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I traveled to Egypt this October. While on the Sinai Peninsula (in Dahab, if you must know, and at what qualifies for a 5-star resort, and please don’t get me started), I saw this sign when entering the resort’s restaurant. It stopped me in my tracks:
It took me a while to figure out that the matrix was designed to educate people about what vegan or gluten-free meant. Except… don’t folks who have a wheat allergy know what they can and can’t eat on that diet? Or is it to educate people who don’t have a wheat allergy, in which case, how is that relevant to guests who are about to eat food?
In any case, the sign is a clusterfuck.
Which brings me to another clusterfuck: SaaS pricing. I turned to the person I was with, who also works in SaaS, and said, “I have to show this to the Sandgarden team. It’s everything I hate about traditional pricing, in a food matrix.”
I remember the first time someone explained pricing in our industry to me, I was like, “What? What is this THING on a diagonal that’s piecemeal and really difficult to understand?” I certainly didn’t get it then, I don’t know. I’m sure some economist has written THE book on this, so forgive my lack of references, but intuitively, it’s dumb.
What does it do for a buyer? It means I need to stare at it and figure out what I really care about, which will inevitably be something like SSO which of course is not part of the Starter Package, but the Team Plan, which means I’m automatically going from free-ish to some ungodly $$ per month, and don’t even get me started on Enterprise Call For Details. Just tell me. I suppose they have told me, actually. It means that I’m going to have to go through endless rounds of negotiation and POVs and “value creation” conversations and then end up with some prepaid sitewide license that I’ll have to renegotiate next year, with of course a new AE because no chance in hell is mine going to make it that far. On the flipside, it means I can probably nitpick my way to a cheaper price because the only thing I want in Team Plan is SSO.
And for sellers, for the AEs, it’s knowing that they’re going to get picked apart by the buyers, and that buyers are going to complain about the packaging when they don’t really want all the bells and whistles, they just want That One Bell, and having to explain Yet Again why the buyer can’t just put down a credit card and why annual prepaids are really the only way to buy and they’re really sorry about it so why not just buy for the number of users you have today to just get the deal over the finish line and you’ll get invoiced prorated for the remainder of the year instead when you grow? To their benefit, I suppose, they know that they’ll have to take 50 - 80% off of the list price, especially if it’s an enterprise, so at least there’s some certainty of the outcome, if only they can win in the bakeoff.
We tried the silly diagonal line at my last company, and every deal invariably tried to negotiate. So we tried something revolutionary: one price, everything included. Zero haggling. Free, outstanding support for all. You were billed for the number of users you had in that particular month, and that was it. You wanted to put 10K on a credit card each month? Go for it! We invariably ended up getting pressed on things like users who only access a resource once a month, and why did someone need to pay for that, but it was minimal at best.
I see folks in AI struggling with similar things: traces, deployment limits, max storage time, throughput, calls, costs per hour, the list goes on and on. The invoices read like insurance bills. Not at Sandgarden. Never.
The zero bullshit way of selling at my last company went a long way, and it’s the same here at Sandgarden.
We have one price: $2K/month for <= 20 users, and $0.0015 per API endpoint call. Month-to-month, no commitments. That’s it.
Everyone gets charged the same thing. If you use the platform, you pay more. If you don’t use it, you pay less. No hassle. No gimmicks. 100% free, AMAZING support, staffed by real live actual engineers 24/7/365 that work directly for the company. And it comes with a 4 week free trial.
Just playing with AI? Great, play here with us! Have huge production workloads? I guarantee you they’re easier to build, deploy, and iterate here with us, and when you’re not dealing with all the shenanigans that go into maintaining this time of engineering, easier means cheaper.
What are you waiting for? Get a taste of what SaaS really should be like. A truly delightful experience, end-to-end. That’s Sandgarden.
