Value-Based Pricing Transformation for a SaaS Platform

The founding team knew pricing was wrong. The top 20% of accounts by usage were getting 4.1x the value but paying 1.4x more. That disparity had been visible in the data for two years. The reason nothing had changed was fear: two competitor SaaS companies had restructured their pricing in the previous 18 months and had both publicly lost customers doing it. The founders were not willing to repeat that mistake without a structured approach that gave them confidence before they moved.

A willingness-to-pay study: 28 qualitative interviews across usage tiers, then a Van Westendorp analysis with 14 more respondents. The value metric that best predicted customer success was identified as 'active workflows run per month', not seats, which was what they'd been charging on. A three-tier pricing architecture was built with a 24-month grandfather clause and an opt-in upgrade incentive for the top 30 accounts. The grandfather clause existed because it was the right thing to do for customers who had been with the company from the beginning, not just because it reduced churn risk.