Pricing patterns for business SaaS applications

Abstract

Software vendors face problems with pricing their business SaaS applications. A typical characteristic of a business SaaS application is that it should be available to different kinds of customers that have their specific wishes. Therefore, business SaaS applications should support configurability and therefore a multi-tenancy architecture is the best solution. Other consequences of provisioning business SaaS applications are that the cost structure depends on the chosen deployment method and that metrics are needed for measuring usage. Pricing problems are identified at the case study company (a large business software vendor in the Netherlands), solutions are developed and experts evaluated the solutions. This resulted in an overview of appropriate pricing patterns for business SaaS applications, describing the problems, solutions, examples and consequences found in this study.