Towards Effective SaaS Pricing Design: A Case Study of CCSIM
摘要
The widespread adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) has led providers to offer diverse pricing to meet varying customer needs. However, there is currently no methodology for eliciting and designing these structures. In this paper, we present our experience in defining a pricing for CCSIM, an advanced simulator designed for deploying virtualized, highly customizable cloud continuum architectures that initially lacked one. As a result, CCSIM improved its transparency for customers- allowing them to better understand the offered features and their associated costs- and increased provider profitability. Building on this practical experience and towards our vision of pricings as software artifacts, we devise a first approach towards a process that we term “SaaS pricification” -a method for defining consistent, easily manageable, and profitable pricings. In short, this work introduces SaaS pricification as a step towards integrating pricings into SaaS products lifecycle, offering an initial approach derived from the practical experience of pricifying CCSIM.