What is by-product pricing?

What do you think about Pricing Plan of SlideShare ? Will Simpler Pricing plan increase conversions?

• Backgoround : Some of worlds best SaaS providers like products from 37Signals, wufoo  have a pattern of charging more as the usage of their products increase.  Slide Share has a complicated feature + usage pricing plan. Also usually features are reflective of increased usage at new levels for Eg the pricing plan of Adobe Creative Cloud , however in SlideShare you are charged for Lead capture but not allowed Geo targeting unless you shell out more money. What Slideshare is trying to tell me is that If I need 30 leads I do not need Geo Targeting and If I need 75 I need geo Targeting  !! But the fact is If I need lead capture , geo targeting should be a given.  What will I do with leads from different parts of the world? Also will not simpler Pricing plan increase conversion ? Why is Slideshare doing what they are doing ?

• Answer:

  Hi Himanshu, I believe Ross already responded to your query elsewhere, so instead of speculating on Slideshare's pricing policy, let me share how we have come up with our pricing plans. First of all, getting pricing right is a near impossibility for a service such as ours where majority of users will never ever pay. We have two types of audience. Those who uploads and those who reads. One easy way to treat these two groups of audiences are that those who reads are the leads for those who uploads. Of course, nothing is this simple, but let's go with this for the time being. We currently have three pricing plans, FREELANCER, BUSINESS and ENTERPRISE in addition to FREE which is considered as PERSONAL account. Our focus is quite different from everyone else in the market, whilst all of us have the same basic offering of document/slide sharing. We believe our role is to provide maximum value for existing document assets. This is quite a contrast to creating new content for marketing. To deliver maximum value, we need to ensure that the documents customers have uploaded is seen by prospects and customers alike, wherever they are. This means not just expecting everyone to come to http://edocr.com to read the documents, but display the documents wherever they are. Hence our partner lead strategy. To keep our costs to a minimum, we decided way back to charge per document, bundled into packages. You could consider this as uncompetitive given none of our competitors charge this way. But we had to, as the sole self-funded tech startup in our space. At edocr every penny counts! Having taken the decision to charge per document, we then had the problem of figuring out what the plans should include. We wanted to charge much more for the Enterprise, as the perception was that would be where we would make the most revenues. Initially we got this all wrong, as the charge per documents in Enterprise package was much higher than the FREELANCER package. From our point of view, this was justified, but customers got confused, so we decided to streamline where as you go in price, the cost per document also dropped, and the number of features increased. We believe this is simpler to understand from a customer's point of view. Products like ours provide many benefits, but we have to pick one which we believe provides the maximum demonstrable benefit. In our case, these are leads. We took a decision to provide unlimited leads. If we limited the number of leads provided, we would constantly get criticised for their quality. This problem is now removed. The more leads we can capture for our customers, the more happier they would be. So why should we restrict their happiness! Hope above makes some sense. We are constantly listening and learning, as we know we have not got pricing right yet. Love to hear what you think about above..