Justin Duke

Maybe you want to segment by tag or by target user in a certain vertical.

Bundown makes it really easy to do that.

Great question.

It's around two-thirds comes from that flat SaaS revenue.

The flat revenue is sort of the paywall for some of the premium features like custom domains, advanced analytics, that sort of thing, whereas metered is purely based on volume.

So only a third of ButtonDown's revenue comes from that just tax on top of the email you're sending to subscribers.

Two-thirds, the majority, is coming from the premium feature set.

I think if I had to choose between the two, purely usage-based because it leans into expansion revenue a bit more nicely.

You're always going to have an upper bound if you do that conventional three-column SaaS pricing grid of $29 a month, $99 a month, $199 a month.

You're then tying yourself to that maximum price unless you have a contact us thing.

If you do something that's purely usage or metric-based, you open yourself up to grow your revenue and your ARPU per customer as they mature and as they continue to do well on the platform.

I think that's fair.

I think one of the things I still need to resolve is the fact that my unit costs are very similarly disincentivized.

I pay a certain fraction of a cent per email I send to AWS.

So in a way, I'm almost a little bit disincentivized for my customers to use the platform extensively.

an account that sends out one email a day is costing me 30 times more than an account that's sending out one email a month, even if I'm taking away a pretty similar margin from each one.

So that's something I still think I need to work on a little bit with the business model.

But it's why I've found a bit of success with sort of the hybrid approach of you get that metered billing, but then you also get that flat margin on top of it.

I launched it in around 2016.

It was less of a company and more of a very hackish MVP because I wanted to use it.