'He just increased his price'- Is not very nice if you want to get new customers.
Raising prices may actually increase sales. I think some of the problem is a lot of us are seeing this relationship between the tailor and his clients through the lens of software or service providers. For any right thinking business person there is no pride in going into hacker meetup and saying "I just had to upgrade from the 28 dollar a month plan to the 39 dollar a month plan at saas-of-the-month.com". Guys that buy 4000 dollar suits are operating in a different world. They pay 500 bucks for the custom fit, and the other 3500 bucks pays for being able to say they paid 4K for a suit AND you can't get one when it comes time to play "biggest dick on table" at the next board room meeting.
As patio11 often points out you're wrong about software & suits being in different worlds.
Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit. I routinely approve those sort of expenses without spending more then 2 seconds thinking about them.
> Any real software business is happy to upgrade from the 28/mo plan to the 39/mo plan if it gets even the tinniest benefit.
But I'm not referring to benefits, I'm referring to "bragging rights". Say your company was utilizing a SaaS that offered a "Freelancer" tier and an "Agency" tier (where "Freelancer" costs less and offers less than "Agency"). Now if your company's needs could be serviced by the limits of the "Freelancer" tier would you pay more for the "Agency" tier just for the prestige of saying you pay for the "Agency" tier? No, you wouldn't. However that does happen with suits (or watches or luxury cars or other luxury goods), it's signalling.
FWIW: I was reading an article from Patrick / Patio11 just the other day when he talks about having experience with large companies upgrading their SaaS package just because the upgraded name sounded better on an expense report.
So it sounds like some SaaS upgrades may, in fact, be linked to the name of the package and nothing more!