Back in 2007, Paul Farnell wrote this article on Carsonified about “How to price your web app”. It details a few ideas on how you could charge / price your web baby.

I’ve taken a moment to analyse what the pros and cons of this method are:

Pros

• People know what they’re paying on a monthly basis.
• People can upgrade when required
• Usually these systems come with a free limited account

Cons

• Although extra plans exist, you cannot assume the customers would be aware of their options to upgrade
• Any notices / mentions of the ability to upgrade can appear to “chase” the user to upgrade.
• People might pay for more than what they want to use. For example they might not use all their allocated allowance for the £20/month plan, but might have grown out of the £10/month plan.

Now, i know that a lot of systems out there have pay-monthly plans, but here at codepotato we’ve been thinking of ways of combating the problems with pay-monthly web apps. A few of the alternatives to “pay monthly” are:

• Fixed fee plans (1 plan suits all)
• Pay as you use (used in cloud computing / online storage systems)
• Top-up and go (used on the Envato marketplaces, like themeforest)

Would welcome any comments you have on this matter, and whether you are aware of any pro’s / con’s that i’ve missed.