SaaS Business Apps with a Paid Mobile Client

Last week I was searching the App Store for an unrelated item and I came across the listing for the HotSchedules iOS app. Now, I normally wouldn’t pay any attention but HotSchedules, with their office in Austin, TX, is actually owned by Red Book Connect, which is based in Atlanta. More importantly, I saw a price tag of $2.99 to buy the app, which really surprised me. Why the surprise? HotSchedules is a B2B Software-as-a-Service app for scheduling hourly workers (e.g. restaurant employees, retail staff, etc) — I’ve never seen a SaaS business app with a paid mobile client.

It got me thinking about why they chose to charge for it. Here are a few ideas:

• With an extremely large number of end-users forced to use the software, HotSchedules sees it as an additional, meaningful revenue stream (web based access to the product is free)
• HotSchedule’s end-users, which are hourly workers, change jobs frequently and are likely to only use their app briefly, making support costs higher, and thus this could be a way to offset some of those costs
• HotSchedules is in a competitive industry with foes like PeopleMatter and SnagAJob.com, providing more pricing pressure on the core product, such that if they can offer the main application at a lower price, they can capture more market share and make up the revenue via end-users

I don’t believe paid mobile clients for B2B SaaS app will ever be the norm, but it’s interesting to know that there are examples out there and that companies are trying it.

What else? What are your thoughts on SaaS business apps with a paid mobile client?