Felix Mörée’s THE 100-PAGE SUBSCRIPTION PRICING BOOK: A Short Guide to Mastering Saas and Xaas Pricing is a tightly focused work. Primarily covering the phenomena of “software as a service” (SaaS) and “anything as a service” (XaaS), Mörée’s thesis is that companies all too often price their services incorrectly—noting that they historically invest miniscule amounts of effort in ensuring what they sell is priced accurately. Mörée’s solution is to prioritize pricing, offering useful case studies and examples from industry to illustrate his points.
Monetization models are many and varied. Mörée observes that between the niche approach of offering a highly specialized product with deep integration to a single sector and the broader approach of targeting the mass market with a generalized product with simple pricing, there are all sorts of competing positions; and understanding how best to leverage these is key to effective pricing. The book contains various visual aids in the forms of graphs, tables, and plots—though it might be said that some readers will find the more complex of these largely unnecessary, tending to spread more darkness than light. Footnoting is not copious, but when Mörée makes a point of importance, he is meticulous in offering a source in support.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of the book is how well-organized it is. While economics and business experts often write well but structure poorly, Mörée offers straightforward structuring in the form of short chapters with extremely narrow topics. These include pricing strategy, deciding what aspects of a service should have a charge attached to them, and creating a monetization model that can be monitored and updated—this last being an aspect of pricing that in Mörée’s view is consistently overlooked. In addition, Mörée also offers useful chapter summaries.
As befits a book in this field, the acronyms and abbreviations fly thick and fast, and Mörée is careful to provide a comprehensive glossary. The result is a clarity and purposefulness of thought that's rare in the genre, making THE 100-PAGE SUBSCRIPTION PRICING BOOK a most worthwhile addition to the literature on pricing.
Benefiting from a clear layout and pithy sections, Felix Mörée’s THE 100-PAGE SUBSCRIPTION PRICING BOOK: A Short Guide to Mastering Saas and Xaas Pricing offers an excellent survey of efficient subscription pricing.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader