Playbook, SaaS company
Tier boundaries are the real question, not the headline price
Almost nobody arrives at a pricing page unable to read the numbers on it. They arrive because the numbers do not tell them what happens to a deactivated teammate, what a seat is when three people share a login, or what the bill does when they cross a limit on the eighteenth of the month. Those are fixed rules rather than facts about the asker, which makes them the largest block of pricing volume an assistant can genuinely close.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for pricing questions holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The published grid answers the easy half, and the questions that reach chat are the boundary rules underneath it that the grid deliberately compresses.
- Pricing is a live commitment, so an uploaded copy of the page is accurate on the day it was uploaded and quietly wrong after the next repricing.
- Much of this volume comes from people who have not signed up yet, so a slow or evasive answer costs a signup rather than merely irritating a customer.
- Any figure produced here becomes the figure a buyer opens a negotiation with, which is why unpublished discounts are a category rather than a judgement call.
How it arrives
- what counts as a seat on the team plan
- is a deactivated user still billed until renewal
- what happens if we go over the monthly limit
- can we switch from monthly to annual halfway through
- does the starter plan include single sign on
- do you charge for viewers or only for editors
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The tier boundary rules behind the pricing grid | Written as rules rather than as a table: what makes somebody billable, whether removing a member frees a seat immediately or at renewal, whether crossing a limit blocks, throttles or bills, and how a change part way through a cycle is prorated. This is the document that does not exist at most subscription companies and the one that answers most of the questions. |
|---|---|
| The plan comparison, including what each tier deliberately excludes | Marketing pages list what a plan includes. Buyers ask what it leaves out, and the honest exclusion list stops a signup that would have churned in week three. Index both halves so the assistant can say no as precisely as it says yes. |
| Annual and monthly terms set out side by side | The commitment length, when the annual term renews, whether an upgrade mid term is possible, and what happens to unused seats at renewal. Annual terms are where published pricing stops being self explanatory. |
| Currency, tax and regional handling | Which currencies you bill in, whether the listed figure includes tax, and how business tax numbers change the total. This decides whether a published price is the price somebody actually pays, and it is asked from every market that is not your home one. |
The reply
A seat is any member with access to the workspace, and deactivating somebody frees the seat at your next renewal rather than straight away, so the current cycle bills for the original count. Switching from monthly to annual mid cycle is allowed and the unused part of the month is credited against the annual total. I cannot see your workspace or your current seat count, so if you want the actual figure for your team, leave your name and email and somebody will work it out with you.
It answers two rules exactly and attributes them to your own published terms, which is the part the visitor came for. Then it draws the line in the right place: the rule is general and quotable, the number is specific to an account it cannot see. Ending on the handover rather than on the refusal keeps a live buyer moving instead of sending them back to the pricing page.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks for a discount, a volume arrangement, a custom term, or a figure calculated for their own workspace.
Anything beyond the published plans is agreed with the team rather than quoted here, and I cannot see your workspace to work out a figure for it. If you leave your name, your work email and roughly how many people would be using it, somebody will come back to you with real numbers.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- A discount, a price floor or a volume rate that does not appear on the published pricing page.
- What this particular workspace will be billed at the next renewal.
- The terms of a plan that has been retired, however recently it was withdrawn.
- That a limit can be raised or waived, since only somebody on the team can agree to that.
Questions
- Our pricing changes every few months. Will it keep up?
- It keeps up with whatever it reads. Pointed at the live pricing and terms pages, a recrawl picks up a repricing the way any other page change is picked up. Pointed at an exported copy, it will keep quoting the old plan names long after you have stopped selling them, which is a worse failure than not answering at all.
- Can it tell a prospect which plan they should be on?
- It can lay out what each tier includes and excludes and let them decide. What it should not do is take a description of their team and recommend a tier, because that reads as a commitment about their situation rather than a statement about your product, and it is the answer people quote back when the plan turns out to be wrong.
- What do we write down first if our pricing rules are only in people's heads?
- The seat definition and the overage rule. Those two produce most of the questions and most of the billing disputes that follow them, and writing them down once fixes the assistant and the pricing page at the same time.
Keep reading
- Everything for a SaaS companyOne widget serves prospects, trialists and paying customers. What it can answer about plans and limits, and what has to reach a person.
- Handling pricing questions in generalPublished price versus the price for this buyer. Bands, ranges and from pricing, and why a firm number for unscoped work is the damaging failure.
- Explaining how a charge was calculated without ever seeing the chargeProration, tax numbers and missing invoices arrive constantly. What the assistant explains from policy, and the point where it takes a name.
- A cancellation message is a retention conversation that has not happened yetThe assistant cancels nothing. It can be exact about notice, the last charge and what happens to data, then get a person into the conversation.
- A procurement reviewer working through a vendor assessment at speedMid deal a buyer's security team pastes control questions into chat. What can be cited, and why the spreadsheet stays somebody's job.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.