Flat And Fixed Rate Software? Here's How Dead Drop Makes Its Pricing Model Work
By Don Harold, Dead Drop Software
The collaboration tool market is thriving, partly due to a more widespread acceptance of remote working and recognition of the benefits business-to-business collaboration brings. One great thing about a thriving market is users get to explore products with a wide range of features. Some collaboration tools are ideal for internal teams, others are purely for business, and some can be quite useful for personal projects or managing family life.
On top of different features, collaboration tools are also offered at different price points. Just like most SaaS, these tools are offered with subscription plans. Some come with long-term contracts while others have recurring deals. Some come with limited number of users or features while others are more generous but pricey.
Dead Drop pricing deviates from the norm in three ways:
- We offer fixed and flat pricing — Dead Drop is priced at $79 per month. This is a flat and fixed rate. It doesn’t increase when more users are added. It doesn’t change when a user runs additional projects.
At the time of Dead Drop’s release, a majority of collaboration tools were sold with non-flat or non-fixed rates. But Dead Drop has always been offered at $79 monthly. We wanted to offer users a product that doesn’t have a complex pricing system. We also wanted the product to be attractive to both small and large businesses. The flat pricing is especially helpful for entrepreneurial eventualities. For instance, let’s say a team needs to hire more business consultants or members. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean paying more for your online collaboration tool because Dead Drop has a fixed and flat rate.
- Users get unlimited everything for $79 per month — Taking the uncomplicated pricing one level higher, Dead Drop also comes with unlimited everything. Again, we took into consideration businesses of all sizes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a freelancer or a multi-national business with huge teams, Dead Drop has got everything you need for smooth collaboration. It just makes sense for us.
There’s also the ease of expansion teams can look forward to when using Dead Drop. Because a Dead Drop plan gives you unlimited users, unlimited storage, and unlimited projects, you won’t have to worry about additional expenses when your team grows.
- We don’t have long-term plans — Dead Drop plans are offered in recurring monthly terms. We don’t have long-term plans because we think these types of plans feel like traps. Business owners want flexibility and this is one thing our recurring monthly plans offer. But renewing is a fairly easy process. We also send out proper notifications to users in case their plan is about to expire or has expired.
Will we make more money if we offer only long-term contracts? Definitely. But our goal is to offer a secure platform for business to work together and being able to do that in a way that’s easy on the pockets is a bonus we are quite proud of.
In line with our goal to offer users simplicity and flexibility, our customer support team is also readily equipped to lend assistance.
Our $79 recurring price already comes with free customer support. A user does not have to pay for getting help on how to set up, use, or manage their Dead Drop account. Additionally, despite the potential high volume of concerns due to the flat and fixed rate, our support center has so far been able to manage any user issues that have come their way.
The customer support center manages support and bandwidth resources by collecting all necessary information regarding issues affecting high-volume customers and uses the gateway approach to determine if it requires escalation or whether it can be resolved by customer support or on the customer’s end. All our inbound and outbound calls are documented and we maintain a knowledge base article that contains problems and solutions of issues called for by existing customers and possible issues that may occur with a decision tree on how to handle them.
The flat and fixed pricing model of Dead Drop may not be the standard in the online collaboration market but it works for us. In fact, other companies are also starting to realize the benefits of this type of pricing (e.g. Basecamp now has fixed and flat rates). If this type of pricing — along with the added customer support — gives our users simplicity and flexibility, it’s safe to say we’ll stick with it.
About The Author
Don Harold is the digital marketing specialist for Dead Drop Software, a business-to-business (B2B) cloud based system that allows companies to securely communicate, share files, and conduct lightweight collaboration with their external business partners.