Agreed. I posted this comment a few years ago, but it looks like it's relevant as here as well:
A potential acquisition came our way that seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. Customer traction and revenues, the features exactly what we were looking to overhaul. There was very high internal interest in acquiring the technology and the company.
The need for this set of features was so high and the internal development estimated to be so costly (in developer time and delays in other projects) we were willing to overlook that this app was not built on our primary stack and only a few of our developers were familiar with. The language choice made by the company didn’t cool our appetite. However, technological choices made us pass on the acquisition.
They didn’t use a framework.
This means that our developers would have a very long learning curve. We also saw a lot of code that did what a framework would have taken care off and this means that we would have had to learn, maintain and expand that code instead of working on the revenue generating features.
We found close coupling of code all over the place. This meant we couldn’t quickly extend and modify the features as we wanted without first paying back the technical debt accumulated by the developers.
It wouldn’t have mattered which framework they would have chosen as most of them have good documentation and force some sort of standard development practices. However, we couldn’t take a chance that all the behind the scenes stuff would need a rewrite if we wanted to expand and scale the platform. We passed.
This is exactly what I do at my SaaS platform. The "Welcome" email explains that you can do the click-here-and-do-yourself approach to onboarding or if you need help or have a question, just reply to the email. I think that's the lowest friction option for most new users. Over the few years that I had this in the welcome email, very few people took advantage of the offer and replied.
lbj, I agree. In my current SaaS app, I have a few customers that consistently try to take advantage of the billing grace behavior to save peanuts by canceling/re-subscribing/canceling/re-subscribing to try to fool billing system. Much as you, I've learned to let that go and hope for a change in behavior in the future.
To try to combat this issue in another app[1] I'm involved in the pricing packages are tiered at 5 SKUs / 200 SKU / Unlimited SKUs. As the customer grow, the driving function of plan upgrades is the volume of SKUs they work with. They also get extra features to better support operating at the higher volume. You don't get high volume features with the 5 SKU plan... We'll see how this approach shakes out.
A few years ago I attended a SaaS pricing discussion and two of the key insights that emerged were:
* For companies that gated based on usage, free/trial users were much more likely to make the transition to a paying customer. For companies that gated on features, free users tried to find all kind of ways to get things done without paying for the additional functionality.
* In the early days of many companies, most of the features of the product were given away for free, with just a a handful of features gated into premium plans. As companies grew, they realized that many of the features they should have gated, were now free, leaving little incentive for the users to convert.
A potential acquisition came our way that seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. Customer traction and revenues, the features exactly what we were looking to overhaul. There was very high internal interest in acquiring the technology and the company.
The need for this set of features was so high and the internal development estimated to be so costly (in developer time and delays in other projects) we were willing to overlook that this app was not built on our primary stack and only a few of our developers were familiar with. The language choice made by the company didn’t cool our appetite. However, technological choices made us pass on the acquisition.
They didn’t use a framework.
This means that our developers would have a very long learning curve. We also saw a lot of code that did what a framework would have taken care off and this means that we would have had to learn, maintain and expand that code instead of working on the revenue generating features.
We found close coupling of code all over the place. This meant we couldn’t quickly extend and modify the features as we wanted without first paying back the technical debt accumulated by the developers.
It wouldn’t have mattered which framework they would have chosen as most of them have good documentation and force some sort of standard development practices. However, we couldn’t take a chance that all the behind the scenes stuff would need a rewrite if we wanted to expand and scale the platform. We passed.