Trends in Industry Support for Pricing-Driven DevOps in SaaS

The SaaS paradigm has popularized the usage of pricings, allowing providers to offer a wide range of subscription possibilities. This creates a vast configuration space for customers, enabling them to choose the features, limits and guarantees that best suit their needs. Regardless of the reasons, c...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: García Fernández, Alejandro, Parejo Maestre, José Antonio, Cavero López, Francisco Javier, Ruiz Cortés, Antonio
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2026
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:idus________::d826dd48b3654315149cd202fe9886cc
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/186346
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2025.3634801
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cloud-based IS engineering
pricing
software as a service.
Descripción
Sumario:The SaaS paradigm has popularized the usage of pricings, allowing providers to offer a wide range of subscription possibilities. This creates a vast configuration space for customers, enabling them to choose the features, limits and guarantees that best suit their needs. Regardless of the reasons, changes in pricings are frequent, and are increasing their complexity. 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 in frastructure, without compromising quality and reliability. We call this pricing-driven self-adaptation, and this work explores the extent of industry support for it. First, after analyzing 240 pricings from 37 different SaaS over seven years, we reveal a trend of exponentially increasing complexity, mainly driven by a sustained increase in the number of add-ons. Second, acknowledging feature toggling as a promising technique for enabling pricing-driven self-adaptation, we evaluate 18 existing solutions to assess their suitability. However, results reveal a gap between their capabilities and the requirement simposed by the growing complexity of pricings. In light of these results, establishing a standard for pricing serialization and advancing automation in pricing-driven self-adaptation emerge as key steps toward reducing the time-to-market of SaaS pricing updates.