Seeking Advice: User Limit Issue Encountered While Setting Up Free Tier on Microsoft Marketplace

[upliftertom]

We are newcomers to the Microsoft Marketplace, on the brink of launching our transactable solution.

Our product Uplifter.ai is a SaaS tool, and we plan to sell licenses for it through the marketplace.

Our intention was to introduce a free tier to provide users with an easy pathway for upgrading to a different tier. In this free tier, we aim to offer access to only one user. This strategy is designed to motivate users to transition to the next, more feature-rich tier.

However, during the process of configuring the free tier offer, we encountered an error message when attempting to set the user limit to just one user:

As a result, our offer page appears as depicted below, which might confuse potential customers:

Is this user limit issue a technical glitch? It's important to note that we can't present it as a flat-rate option because all offers must adhere to the same pricing structure.

[#2]

@upliftertom I checked mine and looked like it's by design in this case (maximum user can't be lower than minimum user). There are couple work around I have in mind:

1. Keep the plan as is. Your plan description clearly states that this is for 1 user only. When a customer subscribes to your plan, they will need to provide the number of users anyway and they should put the number 1 in there. Once the customer completes steps on their side, you will have a chance to review the number of users they provide before activating the customer subscription.

2. I'd recommend exploring the flat rate billing term by creating a new offer. Flat rate has features that give you more flexibility such as a custom meter which can be used for non-standard billing terms. For example: if you want to charge your customer for additional purchases, more users added, etc. In addition, with flat rate billing term, when you have private offer deals, you can put the total contract value instead of calculating price per User then your end customer must put the number of users when making purchases.

[#3]

Thanks Truc. I got a response from the technical team on this and they couldn't explain the reasoning behind it.

I think we're going to leave it as it is at the moment although we might remove the free tier. It would be nice to have though, because it makes upgrading for the user a bit easier. I'm not sure about the flat rate option, I think it might get quite hard to track and manage at scale,