Comment by jwr

Comment by jwr 3 months ago

Love the idea, but I couldn't find a "pricing" page and wanted to abandon reading immediately (I have no time for unsustainable services). Then I learned from the discussion that the pricing is $2/m, which, two things: 1) I still can't find that price on the web site, and 2) it seems unsustainable to me, so I'm still worried.

I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable. This is of course better for simpler apps/services, but even there you have to be super careful.

qudat 3 months ago

Thank you for the feedback and we agree so we have changed the header nav link from "pico+" to "pricing".

In terms of the costs to run a saas, we are actively monitoring hardware utilization and resource allocation. Antonio and I have a lot of experience building and running saas (and paas) products so we feel confident we can manage whatever usage comes our way. We have also been strategic in terms of the services we provide in an effort to keep service support manageable.

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jimbosis 3 months ago

I had the same frustration as you with finding the pricing information. With some serendipitous clicking, I managed to find it!

https://pico.sh/plus

It does also mention there is a $0 "Starter" tier.

(I found that link on this page:

https://pico.sh/pgs )

EDIT: Mention the Starter tier.

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cookiemonsieur 3 months ago

> I run a B2B SaaS. Support costs is what eats you alive: in case of a complex B2B app anything below $40/month is unsustainable

I agree to an extent. But it largely depends on the complexity of your offering. If all you do is expose flat data through an API, you can maybe get away with an API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo, which would cost virtually nothing as the free tier is very generous.

Just my 2c.

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jwr 3 months ago

Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?
Especially with B2B, it's easy to underestimate the support load for non-technical issues.

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- cookiemonsieur 3 months ago
  
  > Well, but that API Gateway x Lambda x DynamoDB combo will not answer support E-mails, will it?
  How does that factor into the $40/month price point ?
  
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lionkor 3 months ago

$40/month per user, just for support? So for 1000 users, you need to make $40,000 to be sustainable, i.e. like 10 employees?

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conductr 3 months ago

I'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load
Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.

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jwr 3 months ago

If you think you can run a business with 10 high-skilled employees on $40,000 of revenue per month, boy, have I got news for you :-)
Similarly, if you think 1000 B2B SaaS subscriptions is an easy-to-achieve number, I'd wager a bet you haven't run a B2B SaaS business.
Roughly, the calculation is: at $40/month, a single subscription brings in $480/year. That means you can safely afford to spend roughly one hour of support on a subscription PER YEAR. If you spend more than 2h, you are definitely in the red. And you will get support requests, of all kinds: the ones you expect, and then all the stuff about lost passwords, inability to log in, network problems, lost invoices, requests to change the billing period, requests for invoices from last year for a customer that has since canceled and been deleted, data export/import, etc.
People who haven't run a business routinely underestimate the costs of running a business and imagine that these numbers mean that business owners are buying yachts and private jets. People who have run a business realize that it's much more difficult to make ends meet than it seems.

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blatantly 3 months ago

Yeah I think this why "Book a call" level customers are really subsidising it. Say $10/m/u and you get 200 seats. You pay $2000/m but the bugs you hit are likely uniform so you loaf support like maybe 20 individual users. 20 individual users only bring in 10%. So you need the whales to keep it going.

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