Use tailored plans with your enterprise and high-touch customers
Vendors know that some SasS customers appreciate a hands-on level of service or have specific needs that necessitate a conversation around features and pricing. To help vendors and their sales teams work quickly and effectively with these customers we are introducing Tailored plans.
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Tailored plans is a sales enablement practice thats makes use of some of Salable’s existing functionality - features, duplicating/ cloning plans and subscription management. With tailored plans, sales teams can create or clone an existing plan, update it’s features and price, and then migrate the customer’s existing subscription (along with billing information) onto that new plan instantly.
While the practice of offering a customised plan is common for enterprise and high-volume customers, hence the ubiquitous “contact us“ on enterprise plans, some vendors have found that an openness to tailored plans for smaller users has led to less churn and increased loyalty.
Here’s a typical use case that can be effectively addressed by offering a tailored plan:
How Red Apps opened themselves up to Enterprise customers with Tailored plans
Red Apps create fantastic apps and bill with Salable’s per-seat-pricing billing model. They offer three plan levels to their award winning Red App; a free, a basic and a premium, and each has increasingly impressive features.
Their customer Barnes Ltd has been subscribed to the basic plan with 10 seats for a couple years now, and suddenly have a need for one of the features only available on the premium plan. Their problem is that for ten seats the premium plan is unjustifiable considering they only need one of the premium features. Before they regretfully look to an alternative app, they reach out to Red Apps to see if they can have a customised plan made.
Red App receive the message from Barnes Ltd and can see from their subscription history they are a loyal customer. They come up with a new price for a tailored plan based on the paid plan, with the extra feature.
With the new price accepted, Red App’s sales person duplicates the paid plan, renames it, updates the price and updates the feature list. They then find Barnes' subscription, and migrates it onto the new plan, defining the proration and invoicing behaviour as they go.
Instantly, Barnes can access the new feature, and continue to be loyal and satisfied customers of Red Apps for years to come.
Tailored Plans offer a flexible and efficient way to meet the unique needs of your customers, whether they are enterprise-level or smaller users.
By leveraging Salable’s existing functionality, you can create more custom solutions that reduce churn and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The functionality touched in this use case:
A plan's features define the actual functionality in your app, access to a service. They are defined at the product level, and then qualified at the plan level.
Duplicate/clone plansPlan duplication copies and pastes an existing plan, except with no licenses or subscriptions attached. For tailored plans it's a quick way to create a custom plan that's closely based on an existing plan, but it has other great applications too such as facilitating a price-increase campaign.
Subscription managementA plan's features define the actual functionality in your app, access to a service. They are defined at the product level, and then qualified at the plan level.
Are you ready to start offering tailored plans to your customers?
Frequently asked questions
What is a license, a subscription and subscription licensing?
A license is a contract between a customer and a vendor that defines and guarantees what actions a grantee (e.g. a user) is able to access with a product.
A subscription is a service model where a customer pays a recurrent fee per billing cycle, usually monthly or annually.
Subscription licensing is that contract, billed recurrently, to maintain the guaranteed access to the product.
Do I need a subscription?
If you do not intend to charge a recurrent fee for your model then you do not need a subscription.
A subscription is a service model where a customer pays a recurrent fee per billing cycle, usually monthly or annually.
With subscription licensing, part of the contract is reliant on the subscription being operational, so once the subscription ends, or there is a disruption to the subscription, some or all access can be suspended, depending on the terms of the license.
Why do I need a license?
In almost every instance where a user interacts with a service, a license is at least necessary and always beneficial.
A license is a contract between a customer and a vendor that defines and guarantees what actions a grantee (e.g. a user) is able to access with a product.
Even if the product is free and doesn’t involve any form of payment, a license is still necessary for these reasons:
- Control of access. You can control by license exactly what the user can and cannot access within your product, and how much they can access.
- Intellectual property. A license agreement makes it clear that while customers can use your service, they don't own the software itself. It helps protect your code, content, and trademarks from being copied or misused.
- Compliance. Within agreeing to a license, you can define terms of use, privacy policies, and disclaimers. This can help you manage liability and comply with regulations.
In short, a license for your SaaS service acts as a foundational agreement that protects both the developer and the user.
Why not just use Stripe?
We recommend subscription licensing for all scenarios; however, it may be unnecessary if the developer is not concerned with contract protection. Subscription licensing is crucial for managing models like per-seat and flat-rate pricing.
Stripe alone
With per-seat pricing, manually tracking seat assignments without licensing becomes challenging as there's no automatic link between buyer and user specifications. For example, if a customer using Stripe increases their subscription from one to ten seats, they are billed accordingly but receive nothing to allocate those seats—this functionality must be manually handled by the developer.
Stripe + Salable
In contrast, integrating Stripe with Salable allows ten licenses to be directly assigned to users (grantees). This means easier management and tracking of seat allocations. The vendor not only receives payment and details about new seat counts but also oversees license status and can provide customer support based on this information.
If you're a developer who has attempted role identity verification through your payment provider or rudimentary license checks yourself, exploring a dedicated licensing platform could offer enhanced protection for you and your users along with access to functionalities currently unavailable in simpler setups.