The last few months has seen our Product Team working on ways to provide a clearer and more targeted collection of Saasu subscription plans. We are pleased to announce that these new plans and changes will come into effect in the April Product Update (3rd April 2012 at 9.30pm AEST).
We will still have 4 plans but instead of the current ones – Accountants Edition, Professional, Global and Enterprise – the new plans will be Extra Small, Small, Medium and Large. The existing Accountants Edition will be renamed Small and will now be available to all customers. The current Professional and Global Plans will be consolidated into the Medium Plan. The existing Enterprise Plan will be renamed Large. The newest addition to our subscriptions will be the XS (Extra Small) Plan which is targeted at the sole trader or micro business.
| Current Plan | AUD | NZD | New Plan | AUD & NZD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Extra Small | $9 | ||
| Accountants Edition | $16.50 | $16.50 | Small | $20 |
| Professional | $25 | $29 | Medium | $35 |
| Global | $35 | $39 | Medium | $35 |
| Enterprise | $89 | $89 | Large | $60 |
The existing plan names had sometimes been confusing for customers and the move to more generic naming should allow new and existing customers have a clearer idea of where each of the plans is positioned. The software, clothing and food industries have all adopted this globally understood model.
Full details of the pricing and functionality of the new plans is available on the Saasu website.
On January 1st this year the Free Plan (Less than 20 Transactions/Month) was replaced with a Trial Plan.
Free files that were created prior to 1st January, 2012 will be migrated to the Extra Small Plan. The expiry date for this file will be set to your current subscription expiry or, if you don’t have any paid files, the expiry will be 1st January, 2013.
In order to defer the price changes and extend the expiry you have the option to renew your subscription between now and April 3rd, 2012.
Free Trial files created between 1st January and 30th March this year will have the expiry date set to 30th April, 2012.
So why the change? Saasu feels that accounting with bank and other data feeds is now essential for efficient bookkeeping. We want to focus our development energy on supporting products backed by this kind of feature. Getting this data has real costs for Saasu. We feel this is still an extremely cheap alternative at $9 per month. We believe if you value your time you will appreciate this.
The 30-Day Trial option lets prospective customers trial the Saasu application at whichever level they wish (Extra Small, Small, Medium or Large). Previously if a customer wanted to trial the functionality of the Enterprise or Global plan they were required to sign up and pay for 1 month. This is no longer the case.
The consolidation of the Professional and Global Plans into the Medium Plan allows customers on this plan to turn on multi-currency in the Settings area, if you wish to use it.
After 3 years of price stability Saasu has added a lot of features. This change will also provide broader customer access to Saasu’s renowned passionate phone support, where previously this was limited to higher plans. Saasu continues to be a lot better value than competitor products for our feature set.
We are keen to provide the functionality available in the Large Plan including serialised inventory, customised reports, KPI reports and consolidated reports to a broader range of customers. As such we have made the price of this plan more accessible.
As always the Saasu Service Team are available to answer your questions and you are welcome to contact us if you require any additional information.
Hi Karen,
Our previous pricing point was $25 per month for the unlimited transaction version. We also had a free version limited to 20 transactions. In your case neither of our old plans would have worked for you. One at $275 p.a. from your comments would have been to costly and the other too small. I think you will need the $20 plan realistically. We might not be the right product for you but to be upfront, I’d look around and you’ll find we are the cheapest and most feature rich product. It does require you to spread your workload over the year. We agree that doesn’t work for everyone. However, we can’t offer our price at $9 p/mth if everyone only signs in to do their work in the BAS or Tax weeks. The price point would be higher if we allowed that as we would need to buy a lot more infrastructure to handle the load on our servers during usage peaks like this. Hope that explains why it is like it is.
Kind regards,
Marc
I just emailed Accounts and hope to hear back next week when they are back in the office. I wanted to post my letter here because I feel that I’m certainly not the only one in my predicament and am certain that many other small business owners would have the same problems as me with the new subscription system.
Dear Saasu,
I am a small business (sole trader) and realistically don’t want to be subscribing to more than the x-small subscription for my business as over the course of the year, the offering would be more than enough.
However unfortunately, due to the way I process my accounts (and being a mum of toddlers running a business) I am running through the last financial years accounts all at once (I don’t sit down and do them monthly). This means that very quickly because I have a years worth of transactions (payments, sales, purchases) to enter I reached my 50 transaction quota.
I just reluctantly upgraded to the “small” subscription in an effort to finish off my books as I have to have them complete this month, however am concerned that the additional 150 transactions will not be even enough for the purchases I need to enter. Being that transactions consist of every purchase I make, including tiny regular fees and subscriptions etc, this transaction allowance will not suffice.
I can by no way justify any further upgrades just to be able to enter my purchases for 2011-2012. This is a major downfall of the new subscription system. I signed up with Saasu long ago before these new transaction limits came into place. (In 2008)
If I was able to cumulatively use the 50 transactions a month in one hit, once a year (50×12=600) then that would be more than enough and I could successfully use Saasu.
Your structure really makes it hard for the smallest businesses that may not have an accountant or book keeper and may not be monthly entering.
I am hoping you might be able to work something out for me by way of changing my account to 600 transactions a year (rather than 50 transactions a month) on the x-small subscription. Otherwise I will certainly need to find another solution as this is not economically viable.
I hope to hear from you shortly as I imagine my further 150 transactions will run out half way before I’m completed entering my purchases later this evening.
Thank you for the response Marc,
As you can imagine as small business owners we are seeing massive cost increases in utilities, fuel, contractors etc. This was just yet another substantial increase over a previous cost. Yet another item budgeted for that has changed a lot…etc
I understand the development that you have put in, and does not apply to us, some of it does, unfortunately we are locked into a higher cost product because we have a dozen or so Non-Inventory Products.
A big part of the plan that we are stuck with, that we don’t use is Payroll, and I would think a lot of sole traders would be in the same boat as me, we have inventory items but no need for payroll. Could this be looked at as an optional extra to the medium plan, to reduce the cost? This could come in somewhere between medium and small? Medium Lite, Medium (no PR), just throwing it out there.
Hi Michael,
We’ve added a lot of functionality in the last year around bank feeds, PayPal feeds, automation tools, budgetting amongst other things and we have added phone support to that Medium plan. It’s a different plan and can’t be compared to the old PRO plan. Many customers have been able to downgrade to $20 or $9 plans from the Medium $35 plan so they have had a reduction in pricing. We couldn’t do that for inventory being a higher development and infrastructure intensive part of our online accounting software. We have to reflect the use of that feature in what we charge for it. There are still no other products out there that offer real inventory yet they often cost more than Saasu and don’t provide any phone support! Our track record speaks for itself on price changes. We don’t change prices often but like any business we are subject to competitive forces and changes in our cost base so we simply can’t guarantee fixed pricing forever. We also (as is in this case) need to reconfigure our plans occasionally. We constantly add new features, service capability changes and other factors come into play. Hopefully you can consider it from our perspective. Thanks for your comment Michael.
I have to agree with Lloyd, this is a 40% increase in one year from the Pro to Medium Product. The fact that you have had a flat pricing for 10 years is irrelevant to people that only started using your service 1 year ago. I cannot even downgrade because I have a few non inventory items that we sell.
The stupidity of this is that you have given a price decrease to Enterprise Customers who are bigger clients and more likely to afford it, and thumped the smaller businesses who are least likely to afford it and most likely your biggest customer base.
I changed over from our local system to Saasu to get away from constant price hikes and upgrades, now I feel we are being held to ransom.
I have been recommending Saasu all over the place to my customers, suppliers & friends, I don’t think I can do that anymore.
Hi Lloyd,
If you new our history we were $25 10 years ago! We added features; Bank Feeds + Phone Support + PayPal Feeds + Statements Automation + Light CRM and more. We’ve had very flat pricing for over 10 years BUT we now are a completely different product and service. We don’t want to regularly make small incremental increases, it’s not our style and is more painful for customers in our opinion to keep changing things.
If you don’t see the value in time savings from all of these features at $10 p/mth then I can accept it doesn’t work out that well for you.
It seems predatory to keep prices, suck customers in and then jack up fees by 40%. Is SAASU still good value? I believe compared to others it is.
Does it make me feel vulnerable to future price increases? Very much so.
It is good business practice? Not when my existing plan was replaced when the old pro subscription doesn’t expire till June 2012. Also, there are functions there that people simply don’t need. Plus cutting off at 200 transactions per month stinks. It seems an arbitrary decision based on some accountant’s analysis of how much extra money they can collect after analysing the customer base.
This is NOT the way to do business guys.
Hi Julian
Thanks for the great feedback – I’m really proud as an employee of Saasu to work for a company that is so open with its community of customers and partners.
Hi Rebekah
We’re really honoured you chose our blog and this post to leave your comments – thanks for the feedback, and hope you’ll stop by again and leave more comments.
Can I just echo RebG’s comments.
The complaints are fair enough mostly. I’m a long-term (5 yrs) Saasu user who would have been disadvantaged by the former inability to downgrade. So I appreciate the rapid turnaround when the Saasu people realised they got it wrong.
But the tone of some of the comments is really disagreeable. Good for you if you caught them out on a spelling mistake, broken link or have a better way of running their business than they do.
I just counted and Marc has posted here 16 times in the last fortnight. Does that sound like someone who doesn’t listen to his customers? Do you think you would be getting that level of dialogue for your $99-275 a year from your bank, from your telco, from your ISP? Or for that matter from the MYOBs and Quickens of the world?
Courtesy and respect are their own reward people.