A short journey into Spinal's pricing

Since Spinal launched in March 2022, it came with one paid plan: $9/month per seat. As with many things early on in a new business, this was done without much thought. It seemed fair: the more people collaborate on your site’s content, the more value you get.

But as Spinal grew, I talked to more customers. And it became clear that this pricing model had the opposite effect of my goals with Spinal: have your entire team craft content for your SaaS marketing site. Often this is done by one person/team, but it does make more sense to also have a dev- or team lead write the changelog, right? Or maybe have your designers also write or edit the documentation.

Instead, because of this pricing model, the content writing for the various parts of the site, was often done by only one or two people. Not good. So it quickly became clear the pricing model was wrong.

So in May, only a few months in, a new plan was introduced. Unlimited collaborators and unlimited content types (ie. blogposts, changelog, documentation, etc.) under then name “Content Marketing Team”. I moved every customer onto the new plan. This obviously meant a revenue decrease, as some customers had (way) more collaborators on their account.

Early birds gets the worm #

This plan was introduced as “early access pricing”. A low, monthly price for those customers betting on a little, bootstrapped company. Mány companies took this offer!

Now since its launch, Spinal had a free plan. This one was perfect to test the waters, besides being limited to one content type (eg. a blog), it had no limitations. The number of free users outgrew the paid users vastly. This is something I will be looking into in the near future. How can I “use” these free users to help with marketing and sales efforts?

As Spinal grew, more feature requests came in. Some really solid ideas that make crafting content for your static marketing site, dare I say, fun. An many of these features were released. So about 6 months after the announcement it’s time to say goodbye to the early access pricing and open up access to the public (Spinal was only available if you requested access).

So today you can collaborate on your static marketing site for the low, monthly price of $29 (or get two months for free and pay $290 per year).

Keep on listening #

This is not the end of the pricing journey. For one I’ve some ideas for the Personal plan to make it more sustainable. Furthermore I’ve plenty of ideas that would fit perfectly in a separate plan, next to Content Marketing Plan.

Pricing for B2B SaaS isn’t straightforward. There is some trial and error and some mistakes will be made. But I think I’ve found a pretty solid, and importantly, sustainable pricing model. Especially when keeping the future plans in mind.

As always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Published: 1 November 2022 (updated: 7 February 2023)