I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.
I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-seat licensing a bit.
I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.
I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates.
It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this:
Support Person Salary $60,000.00
Fully Loaded Employee Cost $90,000.00
Per Hour $46.88
Support Requests / Hour 6
Cost / Request $7.81
The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".
• No, not unless you have no competitors. And if you have a generic solution to lower support costs by 10%, if you don't have competitors now, you will soon.
• No, software pricing isn't rational. Oh, how I wish it were at times. But in general, unless you're an amazing salesman, your prices have to be at a level that to the customer feel "about right".
They didn't exactly show me the company budget, but I'm as capable of counting engineers as the next guy. Suffice it to say we paid way more than $75k a month for the productivity gains of that custom app. (It was my first encounter with Enterprise Software (TM) and I think I went into programming in part so that no one should ever again have to suffer like us CSRs suffered...)
You're also talking $20,000 a month in direct costs if you're paying that engineer and designer market wages, or about $10,000 if you're paying them its-not-exploitation-if-you-have-equity-wages. If next to these numbers you think $100 for software is a lot of money, you are not a desirable client.
I think it's less about "a lot of money" and more about there being plenty of room for a competitor. Especially one with a "$49/mo for unlimited agents" model.
Like I said, definitely contact me, I think there could be something very interesting for everyone here :)