Add monthly billing for GitLab.com
Overview
We need to give users the ability to pay for GitLab.com on a monthly basis. We want to encourage annual purchases, but monthly billing is a must-have for any SaaS product.
Proposal
On our subscription portal, allow a user to select "Monthly" as a payment option.
- Monthly should be priced at a slight premium.
- Users should be informed that they'll be charged on a monthly, recurring basis.
- The "Period" should reflect 1 month at checkout.
Each day, run a job to check for expiring plans. For these users: if the user has not canceled their subscription, attempt to bill the user for another month.
- If successful:
- Email the user a receipt with a new Period. Thank them for their business.
- If payment fails:
- Email the user that payment failed. Set them to the Free or Early Adopter tier.
OP by @saurabhnanda
At the outset I'd like to state that I run a SaaS business myself and I understand a business' need to prefer annual subscriptions over monthly subscriptions. Having said that, I'd like as an end-customer I'd like to table our situation which is making us think twice before upgrading from free to bronze plan. This might be a common case which is preventing upgrades for others as well.
We have a core dev team and have no problem in purchasing annual user licenses for them. However, there is also a floating/temp team (of interns and contractors) who will be part of our Gitlab group only for a few months. How does the pricing handle this?
Would it be possible to allow a monthly subscription for a higher price, say 5-6$ per user month, or restrict the number of monthly licence to 20-30% of annual licenses?