Is offering à la carte pricing (letting customers pick and pay for individual features instead of predefined tiers) practical for us, or would that become too complex to manage and communicate?

According to our SaaS pricing book, Price to Scale, offering à la carte pricing—where customers pick and pay for individual features—can quickly lead to a level of complexity that is difficult for both management and your sales teams to handle. Here's a concise breakdown:

• Direct Complexity: The book explicitly notes that individually pricing each feature can "make your sales and sales operations teams go crazy with the complexity." This increased operational overhead may lead to communication challenges as well.

• Capability Pricing as a Solution: Rather than allowing customers to choose features entirely à la carte, the book recommends a capability pricing approach. This strategy bundles add-ons or features into well-defined packages, where each add-on may be priced as a percentage or fixed fee. This not only simplifies the pricing structure but also ensures that add-on values scale with the customer’s usage or size.

• Communication Efficiency: Grouping features into cohesive packages makes it easier to communicate value propositions to customers and avoids the pitfalls of customers comparing individual features against multiple combinations.

In summary, while à la carte pricing can feel attractive from a customization perspective, our book strongly advises against it due to its complexity. Instead, adopting capability pricing helps you manage and communicate your pricing strategy effectively while still capturing the value of individual features.