Manifold, the cloud-native marketplace company,
today announced Manifold Plan Builder, a free pricing plan tool for SaaS
businesses that provides an easy-to-use way to define and manage pricing plans.
"It's been far too hard for developer tools companies to actually sell their
products," said Jevon MacDonald, co-founder and CEO of Manifold. "E-commerce is
hardly a new idea but the tools and mechanisms for selling products to
consumers aren't really there for business-to-business sales of developer
tools. With Plan Builder, every SaaS business and developer tools company
has access to a high-quality pricing plan tool to quickly and easily showcase
their products."
Pricing and packaging are key activities every SaaS business needs to decide on
and evolve to make money and grow, and they change as their businesses
change. Adapting pricing and packaging often requires coordination across
different parts of a business. For example, someone has to decide what to
charge for features, another may decide how features are marketed and a
developer implements them in a website and an application.
Manifold's Plan Builder makes all of these tasks possible from one location
with minimal intervention as businesses grow and adapt their pricing and packaging;
changes happen centrally and populate out to their pages, apps and other
reseller channels. Customizable components can be configured with custom calls
to action for different pricing plans, such as "contact us" or kicking off
a provisioning flow in their billing system.
"Making improvements to pricing and packaging based on our users' feedback has
always been hard and slow. It's business logic that ends up embedded
everywhere. It's painful to update and inevitably ends up being
inconsistent across platforms," said John Willman, founder of JawsDB. "With
Manifold's Plan Builder, I've got this great new interface for managing my
plan data, and my pricing page is always up-to-date."
SaaS businesses can click, drag and toggle pricing options in a standard
pricing plan table that showcases their product's features and plans. Once
defined, deployment is as easy as dropping the provided Web Component
embed code into an existing site. Changes to plans are then automatically
reflected everywhere the Web Component is deployed.
By defining and managing pricing plans centrally, testing different pricing
options becomes vastly simpler. Plan Builder's modern Web Component
architecture provides a simple embed code to deploy the pricing plan table
wherever providers need it, just like the analytics and customer support tools
they already use. A GraphQL API makes it easy to access the plan details
directly from code. Providers can use the method that best suits their needs,
even as those needs change as their business grows.
Plan Builder integrates with existing billing tools like Stripe using either
URL redirect or custom Javascript. Providers can use the checkout flow or
contact journey that best suits their business.
Plan Builder is available as a Developer Preview today at
https://manifold.co/build.