software, business-model, pricing, revenueWe have a Software Development Kit product that will soon be ready to go to market. It is a relativly niche product that allows developers to add a geospatial or mapping component easily and quickly into their application.
We are currently designing a business model and I need to do some research into putting into place efficient pricing models and structures.
The target customers are going to be developers, software solution providers and the like.
I would suggest that you start out by not listing a price on your website and instead try to gauge your market's willingness to pay in sales conversations. Discuss the value of the feature, the alternatives they are considering and even flat out what their budget is. Then make proposals based on the needs you were able to ascertain, does the company value ongoing developer support, an SLA etc.
Raise your quoted price until you face serious objection by at least 25% of your customers. Ask yourself whether you notice a natural segmentation of your existing customers and which common requirements unite them, e.g. are your customer split into SME and agencies who simply want to save on developer time and enterprises with much bigger budgets who would not build this in-house and are actively looking for reliable vendors.
Once you have a better idea about your products value metrics, the different groups in your target market and their price sensitivity you can try to segment them into tiers and come up with more rigid pricing tiers, but in the beginning, you want as much contact and feedback from your customers as possible and you don't want to put a pricing page in front of them.
Edit: Since OP specifically asked for resources I am listing two below.
If you want to do a deep dive into software (specifically SaaS) pricing I recommend you check out Price Intelligently, they offer a lot of top-notch free resources. As a stand-alone post, I found this write-up by the founder of meetspace.com most helpful
I have attended a program hosted by the Professional Pricing Society, and found that it provided lots of great pricing insight services.
I was looking at their online course catalogue, perhaps this course would be a helpful resource: Core Pricing Skills
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