Software as a service is a tremendous market. All online services are transitioning to the era of subscriptions. Even Microsoft’s new Office 2013 is will be available as monthy subscriptions. That’s a radical decision for a box software sold in CDs for last 21 years.

Have you ever made a list of which software services do you pay every month? I did:

Surprisingly all of them ranged around a monthly price of 5$ and each solving a single problem, which I will relate with long tail strategy. Instead of selling a huge service for high fees, they sell a simple product making life easier to a broader customer spectrum. That’s a very healthy business model once you got the problem and solution right. It does not take too long to implement the product and start to sell it immediately. Recall, GitHub was profitable on its launch day and continued to be so.

What are some 5$ SaaS products charge you every month?

  • I have a $7 educational discount and I buy $12 plan on GitHub, normally they don’t offer a $5 plan.

(There are valuable comments on Hacker News thread.)