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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.% of the service; %i.e., this development and operation should be Pricing-Driven. 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., Comment: 15 pages. Accepted in the 22nd International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC'24)

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., Comment: CAiSE Forum 2024

As the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm continues to reshape the software industry, a nuanced understanding of its operational dynamics becomes increasingly crucial. This paper delves into the intricate relationship between pricing strategies and software development within the SaaS model. Using PetClinic as a case study, we explore the implications of a Pricing-driven Development and Operation approach of SaaS systems, highlighting the delicate balance between business-driven decision-making and technical implementation challenges, shedding light on how pricing plans can shape software features and deployment. Our discussion aims to provide strategic insights for the community to navigate the complexities of this integrated approach, fostering a better alignment between business models and technological capabilities for effective cloud-based services., Comment: JCIS, 10 pages, 5 figures

As the digital marketplace evolves, the ability to dynamically adjust or disable features and services in response to market demands and pricing strategies becomes increasingly crucial for maintaining competitive advantage and enhancing user engagement. This paper introduces a novel suite of software libraries named Pricing4SaaS, designed to facilitate the implementation of pricing-driven feature toggles in both the front-end and back-end of SaaS systems, and discuss its architectural design principles. Including Pricing4React for front-end and Pricing4Java for back-end, the suite enables developers a streamlined and efficient approach to integrating feature toggles that can be controlled based on pricing plans, emphasizing centralized toggle management, and secure synchronization of the toggling state between the client and server. We also present a case study based on the popular Spring PetClinic project to illustrate how the suite can be leveraged to optimize developer productivity, avoiding technical debt, and improving operational efficiency., Comment: JCIS, 5 pages, 2 figures