Pricing4SaaS: Towards a pricing model to drive the operation of SaaS

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is a distribution and licensing model that leverages pricing structures and subscriptions to profit. The utilization of such structures allows Information Systems (IS) to meet a diverse range of client needs, while offering improved flexibility and scalability. However, they increase the complexity of variability management, as pricings are influenced by business factors, like strategic decisions, market trends or technological advancements. In pursuit of realizing the vision of pricing-driven IS engineering, this paper introduces Pricing4SaaS as a first step, a generalized specification model for the pricing structures of systems that apply the Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing model. With its proven expressiveness, demonstrated through the representation of 16 distinct popular SaaS systems, Pricing4SaaS aims to become the cornerstone of pricing-driven IS engineering.