Honestly, I do not always read the famous terms and conditions either. We can admit that.
This story began during a discovery call with a prospective customer. If you recognize yourself, hello.
It’s not really a secret: all companies are mostly in business to grow and make money.
I have already mentioned the “calm company” movement, and I will write more about it soon. For now, my main goal with Parle is to earn a good living while offering a product that competes with platforms outside Canada at a price Quebec small businesses can afford, and eventually businesses across Canada. It is not “growth at all costs” like many venture-backed SaaS companies.
That gives me some flexibility to set prices that are highly competitive without making them so low that they look suspicious.
How I set a price for a module
Generally, I look at the value clients receive, the competition, and Parle’s real cost to maintain and operate the module.
That is why the Courses module is one of the most expensive at CA$20. Courses usually contain video files, and students consume bandwidth whenever they watch them. Both file storage and video delivery have real costs.
Back to the customer. Their courses contain some very large files: 8K videos.
Parle allocates storage according to the modules enabled in your account. That space is shared across every module, and you can purchase additional 20 GB blocks for CA$5 when needed.
Some competitors say they offer unlimited storage
After doing the math, the customer found that the storage they required made the bill fairly high. After all, 4K and 8K videos use a great deal of space.
SystemIO and Thinkific say they offer unlimited storage, the customer replied.
Had I misjudged the price of storage? Storage is fairly affordable today, but the major cloud providers all charge roughly the same rates. How could these platforms offer an unlimited amount?
It seemed impossible. Their bill for hosting and delivering files could not continually exceed what their customers paid each month. Something did not add up.
What were they not telling us?
The secret is in the fine print
It is easy to advertise unlimited storage, but the terms and conditions revealed that:
- Files cannot be larger than 2 GB.
- “Unlimited” means normal use, and they reserve the right to refuse customers who exceed their definition of normal.
There it was. A classic restriction and a clear lack of transparency.
For context, this client’s lesson files are about 30 GB each. A 2 GB maximum file size makes an “unlimited” plan extremely limited in practice.
Parle probably has some of the clearest pricing in this market. Modules are priced separately, and the storage page shows exactly how much you are using relative to your limit. You can even sort files by size when you need to clean things up.
Another example?
Try finding the exact price of a Squarespace subscription, then try adding the cost of its email package.
When I wrote this post, the prices on their website differed from those shown inside a customer account. Nothing was clear or seemed to remain at the same price. Are they testing how many people will still subscribe after a price increase? Perhaps. I do not know.
But in the end, that’s not even the main point.
You should not have to search all over to find out the real price of your subscription. You should not have to read the full terms and conditions to discover important limitations that are not clearly displayed on the price page.
Pricing should be easy to understand, and so should its limits. If a plan has a restriction, it should appear where you make your decision, not three clicks away or inside a vague phrase like “normal use.”
At Parle, we do things differently. We are not controlled by investors, and we never will be. Parle is an honest product with transparent pricing, no surprises, and no limitations omitted from our pricing page.