Here’s a truth about cloud-based service providers: They often bake extra costs into the price of your subscription. And most of us never know.

One of our customers reached out to us recently with a story about that very phenomenon: He  noticed a price increase on a cloud-based subscription and inquired with the service provider about the uptick in costs. Our customer thought his subscription allotted him a certain number of paid users and free users. The difference lay in the permissions granted to each, and he thought he was firmly within the bounds of the subscription level he’d signed up for.

Then, his bill arrived, and the cost of his subscription had climbed by 50%.

When he asked about the increase, he discovered that the rules surrounding paid users versus free ones had been nuanced. His company had added users liberally, thinking they were free when, in fact, they were not.

This story isn’t meant to deter you from cloud-based subscriptions. We use them, too, and we understand they’re vital to how modern business gets done. Instead, we tell it to illustrate a very real problem cloud-based service subscriptions present: If you’re not paying attention, they can cost you.

Here are a few key reasons why:

• The free trial: It’s easy to sign up for a free trial. The service promises to solve big problems for your business, and you’ve got 14 days or so to give it a try — as long as you enter your credit card information. You tell yourself you’ll remember to cancel before the charges kick in. Then, life happens, and you don’t.
• The user error: You buy a subscription for a set number of users, and that number ends up being either too much or not enough. Your company doesn’t know who’s using it, who’s not and who needs to.
• The rate increase: You sign up for a cloud-based service at a set rate. Then that rate climbs. Sometimes the provider lets you know; sometimes they don’t.

All that leads to one important question: You don’t want to pay for services you don’t have to, but is closely monitoring each of them the best use of your team’s time and resources?

That dilemma is the reason we built SaasTrax. We wanted to take advantage of all the efficiencies cloud-based systems have to offer, without paying more than we need to. That’s why our system not only identifies subscriptions your company may no longer be using, but also the number of users who are actually making use of the service, as well as costs that have increased over time.

We get the irony of creating a cloud-based subscription service to identify excesses in cloud-based subscription spending, but we can promise you a few things: We are 100% transparent with pricing, increases and user limits. And we built our business model this way because we could think of no better way to monitor your subscription costs consistently and effectively.

Back to our story: We are pleased to report our customer honed in on his price increase before it cost his company too much. And now he sees the value of what SaasTrax can provide to a business of any size. You don’t know what you don’t know, but what you don’t know can still cost you some serious money.

We built SaasTrax to help. Click here to explore how we can help your business, starting today!