Abstract
The SaaS paradigm has popularized the usage of pricings, allowing providers to offer customers a wide range of subscription possibilities. This creates a vast configuration space for users, enabling them to choose the features and support guarantees that best suit their needs. Regardless of the reasons why changes in these pricings are made, the frequency of changes within the elements of pricings continues to increase. Therefore, for those responsible for the development and operation of SaaS, it would be ideal to minimize the time required to transfer changes in SaaS pricing to the software and underlying infrastructure, without compromising the quality and reliability. This work explores the support offered by the industry for this need. By modeling over 150 pricings from 30 different SaaS over six years, we reveal that the configuration space grows exponentially with the number of add-ons and linearly with the number of plans. We also evaluate 21 different feature toggling solutions, finding that feature toggling, particularly permission toggles, is a promising technique for enabling rapid adaptation to pricing changes. Our results suggest that developing automated solutions with minimal human intervention could effectively reduce the time-to-market for SaaS updates driven by pricing changes, especially with the adoption of a standard for serializing pricings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
For brevity, we may also refer to this concept as Pricing-driven SaaS DevOps.
- 2.
The base version of PetClinic for Spring can be found here.
- 3.
Previously referred to in the literature as Yaml4SaaS, it has since been rebranded as Pricing2Yaml.
References
Cruz, L.: 37 saas examples you need to know about in 2024 (2024). https://clickup.com/blog/saas-examples/, Accessed June 2024
Fowler, M.: Feature toggles (aka feature flags) (nd). https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html, Accessed December 2023
Gamez-Diaz, A., Fernandez, P., Ruiz-Cortes, A.: An analysis of RESTful APIs offerings in the industry. In: Maximilien, M., Vallecillo, A., Wang, J., Oriol, M. (eds.) ICSOC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10601, pp. 589–604. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69035-3_43
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Pricing-driven development and operation of saas: challenges and opportunities. In: Actas de las XIX Jornadas de Ciencia e Ingeniería de Servicios (JCIS). SISTEDES (2024)
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Pricing4SaaS - supplementary material (2023). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10292553
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Pricing4saas: towards a pricing model to drive the operation of saas. In: International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, (CAISE), pp. 47–54. Springer (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61000-4_6
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Trinidad, P., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: Towards Pricing4SaaS: a framework for pricing-driven feature toggling in SaaS. In: Web Engineering, ICWE, pp. 389–392. Springer (2024)
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Cavero, F.J., Ruiz-Cortés, A.: SaaS Analysis Laboratory Package (2024). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13857484
Ghaddar, A., Tamzalit, D., Assaf, A., Bitar, A.: Variability as a service: outsourcing variability management in multi-tenant saas applications. In: Proceeding of the International Conference of Advanced Information Systems Engineering, (CAISE), pp. 175–189 (2012)
Jiang, Z., Sun, W., Tang, K., Snowdon, J., Zhang, X.: A pattern-based design approach for subscription management of software as a service. 2009 Congress on Services - I, pp. 678–685 (2009)
Mohamed, F., Mizouni, R., Abu-Matar, M., Al-Qutayri, M., Whittle, J.: An integrated platform for dynamic adaptation of multi-tenant single instance saas applications. In: Proceedings - 2017 IEEE 5th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, pp. 257–264 (2017)
Rahman, M.T., Querel, L.P., Rigby, P.C., Adams, B.: Feature toggles: Practitioner practices and a case study. Proceedings - 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2016, pp. 201–211 (5 2016)
Schwartz, B.: The paradox of choice. Positive psychology in practice: promoting human flourishing in work, health, education, and everyday life, pp. 121–138 (2015)
Tërnava, X., Lesoil, L., Randrianaina, G.A., Khelladi, D.E., Acher, M.: On the interaction of feature toggles. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (2022)
Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M.C., Regnell, B., Wesslén, A.: Experimentation in Software Engineering. Springer, Berlin (2012)
Acknowledgements
Authors are thankful to Pablo Trinidad for developing the feature toggling library on which Pricing4SaaS is based. This work has been partially supported by grants PID2021-126227NB-C21 and PID2021-126227NB-C22 funded by MCIN / AEI / 10.13039 / 501100011033 / FEDER, UE, and grants TED2021-131023B-C21 and TED2021-131023B-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
García-Fernández, A., Parejo, J.A., Cavero, F.J., Ruiz-Cortés, A. (2025). Racing the Market: An Industry Support Analysis for Pricing-Driven DevOps in SaaS. In: Gaaloul, W., Sheng, M., Yu, Q., Yangui, S. (eds) Service-Oriented Computing. ICSOC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15405. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0808-9_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0808-9_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-96-0807-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-96-0808-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)