Software as a service has many examples of price discrimination the other direction
As I said, if you charge somebody more for something, there has to be some added value. Making a deluxe or enterprise version of something where the customer freely chooses to pay more for the extra goodies isn't price discrimination, as I understand the term. That's just "having a range of products".
To be price discrimination, you need to be offering something that's substantially the same, but you want to get more business by not selling it at just one price. Airlines, coupons, etc., as I mentioned above.
You can quibble whether this is the "true" definition of price discrimination, but at that point we're arguing the meaning of words. This is what I mean by price discrimination in this discussion. I consider raising prices without adding extra value to be either "monopoly price gouging" or "correcting your dumb mistake of not charging enough in the first place". ;-)
Many people in companies are willing to pay 10X in order to say they're getting the Enterprise version of software instead of the Hobby version of that software, even if the hobby version covers their use case entirely, for signalling reasons.
Enterprise versions of software generally come with support contracts or SLAs, not to mention features that require more support (such as API access, single sign-on, integrations, etc.) that justify the higher price because they come with higher ongoing costs for the service provider.
Even if the software itself is otherwise identical, an enterprise offering is different, speaking from having personally been on both sides of that particular business. Even if most of the "enterprise" users don't actually end up needing that extra support on a regular basis, it's a legitimate added value to have the protection of choosing the more expensive plan that comes with those guarantees. They're basically paying more for the option to get more help when they need it, or to sue you if something goes wrong.
But even if it were entirely for signaling reasons, that still wouldn't make it price discrimination. It's the buyer's choice whether to take a lower-priced offering, and if the seller adds an enterprise package, it's usually not because they're trying to squeeze more money out of customers they already have. They're doing it because they wouldn't get the enterprise customers at all with their existing offer. (It'd be price discrimination if they needed some way to prevent the enterprise customers from buying the hobby offering.)
While SaaS and PaaS vendors may also have price-discrimination offerings in their lineups (closeouts, old servers, "free" tiers, etc.), their mainline plans are usually priced so that the vendor is indifferent to which pricing plan you buy: they're making a decent living even if everybody picks just one plan, whether it's the lowest or highest priced one.
Again, "price discrimination" as I'm using the term is something used to eke additional revenue out of excess supply without destroying your ability to get your regular price for your regular supply. Merely having a range of products isn't. Even Wikipedia says:
Price differentiation is distinguished from product differentiation by the more substantial difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy
This is a bit tricky, because as I explained earlier, "production cost" is a bit of a chimera, due to the question of allocating fixed costs and semi-variable costs. But if you offer an enterprise package with support, you have to pay for some extra support staff capacity just to have them available in the event that this is the month the customer decides to use it. Few of a business's production costs are truly variable, unless you're somebody like Uber, who can instantly hire/fire their drivers. (And they still have lots of fixed and semi-variable costs.)
Anyway, the point is that most SaaS/PaaS companies' pricing tiers are based on varying costs between the tiers, which makes them product differentiation, not price discrimination per Wikipedia.
That being said, the Wikipedia article is actually pretty vague about the distinction at times and notes that only "some" economists argue that signaling premiums make something price discrimination rather than product differentiation. My personal opinion is that perceived value, not "production cost" forms a relatively bright line between price discrimination and product differentiation. If the buyer considers the higher-priced product more valuable, IMO that's product differentiation. If they consider it the "same thing" (e.g. DVDs, airline flights), it's price discrimination.
As I said, if you charge somebody more for something, there has to be some added value.
I think this is symmetric, though. The 'added value' of paying the non-coupon price is that you get the time you would have spent managing coupons and to conspicuously consume non-coupons; the 'added value' of paying the enterprise price is often just the conspicuous consumption of non-hobbyism. But if I want coupons to represent price discrimination, then it makes sense to see the enterprise tier as also price discrimination.
And if we use the 'capture as much consum...
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.