Paywall SaaS: What to paywall and how to package features

How I Closed 10 Customers and Netted Over $70,000 ARR in a Quarter by Adding Just One Paywall in Our SaaS 🤑

The Power of Strategic Pricing

Are you wondering how to create effective pricing and packaging with paywalls for your SaaS? Let me share my experience on how I achieved significant results by implementing a simple yet powerful strategy.

How do I create pricing and packaging with paywalls for my SaaS?

Step 1: Creating Value-Based Pricing

When designing your pricing structure, think in terms of customer value (X). Here's the key:

Freemium plan: Include essential features that solve the baseline customer problem ("Baseline X features")
Premium plan: Offer more value with "Add X" and "Customize X" features

Let's look at how popular SaaS companies implement this:

At TrustCloud

Freemium has essential policies and controls
Premium has ability to add & customize policies and controls

Company	Free Plan	Paid Plan
Figma	3 design files	Unlimited design files
Miro	3 Boards + basic access controls	Unlimited Boards + "Customize" access control
Notion	Basic web publishing	"Customize" web publishing
Grammarly	See your writing tone	"Customize" writing tones

The secret is to take the value you provide to your customers, create a "basic" version for the freemium tier, and offer the "full" version on the premium tier. 👈

How do I gather feedback from your customers about my SaaS paywalls?

Step 2: Gathering Customer Feedback

If you're just starting out, here's a counterintuitive tip: sell individual features 💸💸💸. Yes, you read that right! Make a pitch to sell individual features 👈👈👈

Why? It helps you:

Understand what features customers truly value
Simplify parameters in your growth experiments 👩🏽‍🔬
Identify the key lever within your package 👀

Afterwards, you find have the information to help you layer on top of this key lever feature and wrap it in a package.

Our Success Story at TrustCloud

At TrustCloud, we applied this strategy:

We received overwhelming feedback on Customizing Controls and Policies
We started selling this feature at $X
We then wrapped this premium feature with other features 🎁
We experimented with different packages, always including our proven Customizing Controls and Policies feature 💰

The result? We closed 10 customers and netted over $70,000 ARR in just one quarter by adding this single paywall.

Conclusion

Creating effective paywalls is a fun problem to solve 🙂 Remember, it's all about understanding and delivering customer value. Experiment, gather feedback, and don't be afraid to sell individual features to find your key lever.

Read the comments here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garyyauchan_plg-buildinpublic-paywalls-activity-7244856028628938752-aDVB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Post-Sales and Product Led Growth

Retention and Product Led Growth

Roadmaps and Product-led Growth

Or you can follow me on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/@GaryYauChan/videos

I write daily*** about my learning on launching and leading PLG. Feel free to subscribe.

I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.