Pricing4SaaS: Towards a pricing model to drive the operation of SaaS

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of managing dynamic SaaS pricing driven by business decisions. It proposes Pricing4SaaS, a general specification to represent pricing structures built from plans, add-ons, features, and usage limits, complemented by a YAML-based serialization (Yaml4SaaS). The authors demonstrate expressiveness by applying the approach to multiple real-world SaaS examples and provide tooling (YAML4SAASVALIDATOR, Pricing4Java) to validate and enforce pricing at runtime. This work aims to enable pricing-driven IS engineering, enabling automated adaptation of architecture, deployment, and UI as pricings evolve in response to market and strategic factors.

Abstract

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is a distribution and licensing model that leverages pricing structures and subscriptions to profit. The utilization of such structures allows Information Systems (IS) to meet a diverse range of client needs, while offering improved flexibility and scalability. However, they increase the complexity of variability management, as pricings are influenced by business factors, like strategic decisions, market trends or technological advancements. In pursuit of realizing the vision of pricing-driven IS engineering, this paper introduces Pricing4SaaS as a first step, a generalized specification model for the pricing structures of systems that apply the Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing model. With its proven expressiveness, demonstrated through the representation of 16 distinct popular SaaS systems, Pricing4SaaS aims to become the cornerstone of pricing-driven IS engineering.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Partial view of Zoom's pricing
• Figure 2: Pricing4SaaS model
• Figure 3: Yaml4SaaS syntax