Why We Killed the Per-User Subscription: The Shift to Value-Led SaaS Pricing
Two years ago, during an otherwise ordinary quarterly review, our head of customer success pulled up an account screen that made the room go silent. One of our enterprise clients—a fast-growing logistics company with over 300 employees—had exactly three paid seats on our platform. Those three seats, however, were running nearly round-the-clock automations, pinging our database hundreds of…
In 2020, a logistics firm with just three paid seats on our platform generated $40,000 in monthly value. They were paying $147 a month for access to a service they relied on heavily. We realized that the per-user subscription model was creating conflicts between revenue goals and customer collaboration. Companies were penalizing themselves by limiting tool adoption, leading to password sharing and reduced usage.
Generative AI and workflow automation further diminished the relevance of per-seat pricing. Companies implementing autonomous AI agents saw revenue drops when reducing human supervisors, despite delivering significant operational efficiency. We learned that the per-user model discouraged product virality and fostered resentment during economic downturns.
To address these issues, we implemented a hybrid value-based pricing model. We offered unlimited free viewer and collaborator seats, while maintaining a predictable baseline revenue through a platform fee. This approach aligned software cost with customer ROI, while avoiding the pitfalls of per-seat pricing.
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