How XaaS companies are adapting to the threat of recession

In this month’s report, we look at how XaaS companies are adapting to the threat of recession and aligning pricing and packaging strategies accordingly

July 2022
Authors: Bryan Belanger, Colin Naples

XaaS companies are adapting to the threat of recession and aligning pricing and packaging strategies accordingly

The U.S. inflation rate reached a high of 9.1% for June 2022, while the NASDAQ is down approximately 30% year to date. Technology company earnings have been volatile year to date and are expected to remain uncertain.

The threat of a recession also looms large for “as a Service” companies, and many high-growth SaaS businesses have already been impacted.

According to the Layoffs.fyi Tracker, over 300 startups have made cuts this year, impacting 50,000-plus workers. This activity is not immune to startups; Microsoft, for example, just announced layoff plans that could impact hundreds of workers. Established, well-funded, high-growth B2B SaaS companies have also made significant cuts. ClickUp, for example, laid off 7% of its workforce earlier this year.
This macro environment is impacting all elements of “as a Service” company strategy, including pricing.
In this month’s XaaS Pricing Monthly Pulse, we examine recent pricing updates from the companies covered in our database to summarize the pricing strategy tactics “as a Service” companies are using to navigate choppy macroeconomic waters.
We also provide some thoughts, recommendations and resources that “as a Service” companies can leverage to establish a recession-ready pricing strategy.

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Most vendors are taking small revenue-focused actions while they adapt to the market’s current reality

Current macro conditions have yet to prompt demonstrable reactionary changes to pricing strategies; across our data set of 300-plus B2B SaaS companies, fewer than 10 vendors made changes to pricing during the month. These changes were largely planned strategy actions, such as complete packaging redesigns or launches of add-on products.

Any activities that vendors are currently taking with pricing in response to macro conditions are largely focused on prompting increased conversions for current offers. The most obvious and common example is to offer time-gated promotional pricing to incent certain customers to upgrade to paid plans. This often broadly targets free plan users and/or specific customer cohorts.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, SaaS companies adapted their go-to-market (GTM) strategies to accommodate customer needs. This included actions such as launching new free plans, grandfathering upgrades, accepting longer payment cycles, delaying true-ups and overage charges, and related actions. Look for these approaches to be reinstituted if recessionary conditions persist.

A reduction in actual price points for XaaS products will follow these other actions, if considered at all. Customers are certainly more likely to negotiate for discounts, which will be granted in certain scenarios. Overall, however, vendors will seek to prioritize offering additional value via the actions above and others before reducing price points.

Prolonged macroeconomic pressures may prompt certain vendors to rethink pricing models for XaaS offerings. Usage-based tiering and/or true usage-based pricing models may be launched experimentally by vendors seeking to align their monetization and customer spend to actual usage.

In this month’s report, we look at how XaaS companies are adapting to the threat of recession and aligning pricing and packaging strategies accordingly

XaaS companies are adapting to the threat of recession and aligning pricing and packaging strategies accordingly

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Most vendors are taking small revenue-focused actions while they adapt to the market’s current reality

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