To be fair, I think developing a pricing model whereby features are charged according to the number of users who actually utilise them is actually incredibly difficult to implement, and explain in a coherent manner.
Itâs not so much that the SaaS provider (Fibery) has decided that getting 25/25 + 0/5 users to pay for AI is a better result than getting 10/25 + 2/5 users to pay, but rather that gating feature usage per person makes for a really crappy UX.
For example, if the 5 person company only has 2 people who âuse AIâ, what does that mean in practice?
If one of the 2 âAI usersâ designs a button automation that generates a summary using AI, who is allowed to press that button?
Designing and implementing per-user limits actually requires some serious developer effort, and as mentioned elsewhere, weâd rather put developer effort into value-adding features, than into feature restrictions.
And given how complex the Fibery permissions model already is, limiting capabilities based on which licence tier a specific user is on, would make it even worse.
How can one user explain to another user why he/she is not seeing/able to do the same things?
Also, these kind of limits stifle exploration/innovation. As a workspace owner, I might think I know which of my colleagues need which features. But what should I do when one of them asks to do something with AI? Different licences per user adds work for the admin and adds friction to experimentation/discovery.
Overall, if it costs the 5 person company $50 to add AI (by paying for all users) but only 2 of them âuseâ AI, then itâs up to them to decide if the 2 users get $50 worth of value.
Personally, I like to compare the overall per-person cost of a tool with the salary that a worker is getting paid. How many more minutes of productive work do you need from your employees before the tool has paid for itself?
And for every other feature in the product, there will always be some workspace owners who can say âWell, only 1 of our users actually uses this feature X, so we want a cheaper licence tier that does not include this feature, to be applied to all the other workspace users.â
There would need to be a multi-dimensional pricing policy to accommodate every possible combination
I donât know any company that has managed to get this strategy to work, and just like pay-as-you-go mobile phone plans have largely been usurped by pay-monthly fixed plans, I think consumers have come to realise that they canât expect SaaS pricing to be hypersegmented so that they only pay exactly for what they âuseâ and no more.