In this day and age, most businesses and many individuals use online software that are paid by subscription models.  You sign up for the tool, like it, and never give it another thought.  Your monthly or annual fee gets paid automatically via your credit card the provider has on file.  Let me tell you about two recent lessons we learned that  we need to pay attention to the current pricing models of our providers.

 We use an online portal to collaborate and share information with our clients.  It's pricing model included charges for bandwidth and storage space.  During peak months our fee was approaching $300 per month.  We were recently working with one of their customer service representatives to minimize our storage usage, as we have in the past, and she finally offered up that they have a new pricing model that might work for us.  Just like that, our price dropped to $59.95 per month.  That is a rather substantial annual savings.  It turned out that there had been more competition in the space and that many people were pushing back on the increasing fees with storage and bandwidth.  Was that company calling all existing customers to let them know about that?  No, they were not.  Should they have been?  We believe so, as it would deliver loyalty vs questioning whether they have their customers best interest in mind when a customer comes across the price change. 

Our other experience was not as drastic, but took place when a colleague mentioned that a service that both of us use had dropped in price (they had somehow stumbled across that).  It took a little finagling on the phone, but we were able to get it dropped by approximately $60 annually.

What we've learned is that dynamic changes in the market place impact the online software as a service providers in dramatic ways.  Check in at least annually, if not semi-annually to see if you save money with changed pricing models.