They are, and it’s worth thinking about.
We actually sort of started there. The first big SaaS success wasn’t Salesforce, it was WebEx before that. Salesforce learned from WebEx, just like many of us learned from Salesforce.
And WebEx started off with a consumption-based model. It made sense, because back then, “minutes” had a high variable cost.
From 2003:
$0.45 a minute for video, plus $43.20 just for the audio portion of a one-hour meeting with 6 participants! Woah!
It took falling network prices (and competitive pressures) for WebEx to gain the confidence to move to semi-consumption and then flat-rate pricing. – Read more
