Simplicity in language (and pricing!) can be an act of service

For those of us who work in software, we are all too familiar with the always changing nature of company terminology.

The most ubiquitous and never-ending example of this is the ever-changing names of subscriptions plans. There are entire companies based solely consulting SaaS companies on how to manage their pricing and run experiments to boost their MRR, ARPU, and profits. This is great, but it's rather complicated, and certainly not service-minded.

I believe it is kinder to present what you’re offering clearly and concisely, and to do everything you can to ensure you’re never offering unpleasant surprises. It's an act of service to reduce the mental noise for your customers and employees.

This is another area where KnowledgeOwl has tried to keep service top of mind. We strive to provide a great product at a price that is fair on both sides - to us, and to our customers.

How KnowledgeOwl used to describe its plans

For years now, KnowledgeOwl had prided itself on ‘keeping things simple” by offering all features on all plan levels of our knowledge base software. We technically had three plans (Flex, Business, and Enterprise), but all of them had the same features - the higher “tiers” just included some extras like SLAs or custom terms.

However, this wasn’t as simple as we thought it was.

We found ourselves continually explaining that there were no functional differences between the three plans. If you’re explaining something repeatedly, then it likely isn’t simple!

In retrospect, we realize that we were using the typical SaaS company lingo of ‘plans’, which didn't optimally serve us or our customers.

How KnowledgeOwl currently describes its plan

So, we streamlined our language, and eliminated the three plan levels! We now have one plan, which is elegantly called KnowledgeOwl. Our single plan can be accessed via a monthly or yearly subscription.

We have a single product (KnowledgeOwl), and now we have a single plan (KnowledgeOwl), which you can pay for either monthly or yearly!

You can add Business or Enterprise extras to the plan, but the plan is the same. Those extra are what they sound like, just extras (e.g. Service-Level-Agreements), but not features or plan changes.

We hope that simplifying how we describe our pricing model will make our customers' lives a little simpler, and ours as well. And with any luck, that simplicity will feel like a service as clear as the one our software offers!