Racing the Market: An Industry Support Analysis for Pricing-Driven DevOps in SaaS

Abstract

The SaaS paradigm has popularized the usage of pricings, allowing providers to offer customers a wide range of subscription possibilities. This creates a vast configuration space for users, enabling them to choose the features and support guarantees that best suit their needs. Regardless of the reasons why changes in these pricings are made, the frequency of changes within the elements of pricings continues to increase. Therefore, for those responsible for the development and operation of SaaS, it would be ideal to minimize the time required to transfer changes in SaaS pricing to the software and underlying infrastructure, without compromising the quality and reliability. This work explores the support offered by the industry for this need. By modeling over 150 pricings from 30 different SaaS over six years, we reveal that the configuration space grows exponentially with the number of add-ons and linearly with the number of plans. We also evaluate 21 different feature toggling solutions, finding that feature toggling, particularly permission toggles, is a promising technique for enabling rapid adaptation to pricing changes. Our results suggest that developing automated solutions with minimal human intervention could effectively reduce the time-to-market for SaaS updates driven by pricing changes, especially with the adoption of a standard for serializing pricings.