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.

翻译：SaaS范式已普及定价策略的使用，使提供商能为客户提供广泛的订阅选项。这为用户创造了庞大的配置空间，使其能够选择最符合需求的特性与支持保障。无论这些定价变更出于何种原因，定价要素的变更频率持续攀升。因此，对负责SaaS开发与运维的团队而言，理想情况是在不影响服务质量与可靠性的前提下，最小化将SaaS定价变更落实到软件及底层基础设施所需的时间——即实现定价驱动的开发运维。本研究探讨了行业对此需求的现有支持。通过对六年间30个不同SaaS的150余种定价方案进行建模，我们发现配置空间随附加功能数量呈指数增长，随套餐数量呈线性增长。同时，我们评估了21种不同的特性开关解决方案，发现特性开关（尤其是权限开关）是实现快速适应定价变更的有效技术。研究结果表明，开发最小化人工干预的自动化解决方案可有效缩短定价变更驱动的SaaS更新上市时间，而采用定价序列化标准将对此产生显著促进作用。