The Thursday Thread: Should customer support and onboarding be separate revenue streams?

#4-pricing-resources Thursday Thread
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The Thursday Thread

One question from us, once a week. Share your take :backhand_index_pointing_down:

We want to hear…

Should customer support and onboarding be separate revenue streams?

Many SaaS companies bundle everything together, but we’re seeing a shift toward monetizing these as distinct professional services.

  • Do you charge separately for premium support vs. onboarding help?
  • What do you find customers will actually pay extra for?
  • Where’s the line between ‘included’ and ‘premium’?

Share your experience in the thread.

(BTW we just analyzed how 50+ companies are approaching this: https://pricingsaas.com/reports/monetizing-premium-support)

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Onboarding is about accelerating time-to-value - ideally onboarding is baked into the annual subscription cost - otherwise the account is at risk from day 1.

Support is about maintaining the value. Which is different than experiencing the value initially.

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My answer is both Yes and No. Let me explain. This is based primarily on my experiences as a software product manager, rather than as a pricing consultant.

Any customer support associated with onboarding and removing various adoption roadblocks (particularly early in the life of the customer) should be part of the subscription fee. Doubly true when you are in the start-up phase when over-serving key customers is essential to creating goodwill.

We would allot a fixed number of service hours (hours varied depending on tiers). When these hours were exhausted, we gladly sold them “service packages” of hours in blocks of 10. Turns out these were relatively easy to sell and these became a separate revenue stream that by the way was sold by the customer success team, not sales. Of course, we never charged service hours if there was a technical issue on our end.

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Love these definitions @garrickvanburen!

One counterpoint on Onboarding. We had a separate onboarding fee at HubSpot for Marketing Hub, and it actually worked really well. It was a $2,000 one-time fee that communicated to customers that using HubSpot takes time and education. Was also the first thing we’d discount so we didn’t have to touch the recurring revenue.

Think it can go either way, but would love to hear your feedback on that model.