Architecting Billing for a SaaS

You could try paddle [1] for payment handling. They take care of VAT and other fees. (Note: you have to be a registered business, which is unfortunate for small side projects)

I also found this guide [2] helpful for deciding how to price things.

[1] https://www.paddle.com/ [2] https://neildavidson.com/downloads/dont-just-roll-the-dice-2...

1. What to charge for? Bandwidth? Storage? Other considerations? Unless your service is predominantly driven by storage/bandwidth usage (eg: video), it makes sense to bundle these costs into the customer price.

2. How to collect payment? Is Stripe a good option? What else do I need on the backend? (Assuming this is the US) You can go for Stripe or any other payment provider that gives you a good API for integrating with your programming language. This option eliminates the need for storing credit cards/account information securely (the payment provider is responsible for that and must be PCI DSS compliant).

3. How much to charge? Expenses + desired profit? Research competition. Price discovery is a combination of art and science. Yes, you should price it to cover your costs + expectation of profit. When researching competition, look for feature set comparison and poll the target audience on which features they value the most (and which ones they wish were available i.e., unmet needs). If you are meeting some of those unmet needs, you should play around with price points to determine the perceived value of those features.

4. How to charge? Establishing tiers seems to be a common practice. Free, Personal, Business, Big, Gigantic. Does this simplify billing? Or is it more of a promotional thing, and establishing a single charge rate is simpler? IMO, this helps with customer segmenting and price discovery.

5. What other questions am I not asking?

You may want to check out this resource: https://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing-strategies...

It has a whole list of pricing tactics that may help you and address some of your questions above.

Charge for value. Charge a little less than the value you deliver, to make your product a money-saver, not an expense center. Tiers are sales tools, not billing tools. You give them crappy tiers nobody wants, outrageous tiers nobody would actually buy, and a middle ground that then looks good to make the sale.

Billing is important.

If you are building a SAAS it is not urgent.

Building the SAAS is both more important and more urgent and will inform your final billing structure.

The hard work is building something people want to use and will pay for.

If you don't do that right, billing is irrelevant.

If you do it, you can screw up billing and still fix it later.

Good luck.

Other consideration : deciding between pay-per-use versus fixed pricing. May not be relevant to your SaaS; it depends. If it is, then pay-per-use requires metering on the backend to count the number of operations / resources used.