Your Seat-Based Pricing Model Is Breaking

You probably felt it six months ago. Maybe longer.

Revenue per customer used to grow naturally — more employees meant more seats. Simple math. Predictable growth.

Now customers are consolidating users. Using AI to do what required three people last year. Questioning every seat during renewal conversations. Your ACV is flat or declining while the value you deliver keeps expanding.

This isn’t a sales problem. It’s not a competitive problem. External forces are breaking the fundamental logic of how you charge.

LLMs let customers accomplish more with fewer people. Economic pressure makes every headcount decision scrutinized. Efficiency gains—the ones you promised would make customers successful—are now cannibalizing your revenue model.

And if you’re PE-backed or recently acquired other products, the complexity is worse: multiple pricing models across your portfolio, no coherent thread on what customers actually value, every deal negotiated from scratch.

You need to rebuild from what customers actually value—before the model becomes unsalvageable.

The Question Nobody Can Answer

Ask your sales team: What are customers actually buying from us?

You’ll get different answers. Features. Outcomes. “It depends on the customer.” “We solve their problem.”

None of that helps you price coherently.

Here’s what you actually need to know:

What economic outcome are they paying for?
How do they realize that value?
What’s their revenue or cost driver—not yours?
Where does value scale as they grow?

Without answers to these questions, pricing is guesswork:

Sales negotiates every deal differently
Published pricing stops short of your largest customers
Cross-sell and upsell opportunities are invisible
You can’t explain why Customer A pays $50K and Customer B pays $150K for “the same thing”

This is what I help you figure out.

Through customer research and strategic analysis, I clarify what customers are actually buying—then help you rebuild pricing and packaging around those insights instead of your internal cost structure.

How This Actually Works

Most pricing consultants start with competitive benchmarking, willingness-to-pay surveys, and tier optimization.

I start with customer research. Not “Would you pay more for feature X” surveys. Actual conversations about:

What problem were you solving when you bought this?
How do you measure success internally?
What would change if you stopped using us tomorrow?
Where does the economic value show up in your business?

From those conversations, patterns emerge. Not what customers say they value, but what they’re actually paying for — the outcome driving their business economics.

Once that’s clear, everything else becomes obvious:

Value metric design – What should you charge for? (Transactions processed, not seats. Revenue enabled, not users. Operational capacity, not devices.)
Portfolio architecture – How should 5-10 products fit together coherently when customers don’t care about your org chart?
Tier structure – What differentiates a $10K customer from a $100K customer in terms they recognize?
Migration strategy – How do you transition existing customers without blowing up renewal rates?

Timeline: 8-12 weeks
Investment: $45K-$75K depending on portfolio complexity

What you get: Customer value clarity. Pricing structure aligned to their economics. Evidence-backed direction for growth.

What you don’t get: Guaranteed outcomes. I provide clarity and strategic direction. Execution is yours. Sometimes the research reveals uncomfortable truths about market positioning or product-market fit. I don’t soften findings to make them more palatable.

Who This Is For

Companies I work with:

$25M-$100M revenue
PE-backed B2B SaaS
Multiple products or customer segments creating portfolio complexity
Business model under acute pressure right now

Leaders who hire me:

New CEOs in first 90-120 days inheriting pricing chaos
Post-acquisition teams trying to rationalize multiple pricing models
CFOs watching revenue per customer decline while value delivered increases
Anyone realizing “we’ll figure out pricing later” is no longer viable

Industries where this matters most: Field service management, construction tech, real estate software, professional services platforms, logistics—anywhere seat-based or hourly pricing is collapsing under external pressure.

A Recent Example

PE-Backed Real Estate SaaS: 10 Products, No Unified Logic

They came to me with a classic portfolio problem: acquired 10 products over several years, each with different pricing models, serving the same customers (real estate brokerages).

Brokerages were consolidating, three years of a sluggish housing market. Fewer agents per office. Their seat-based pricing across all products was evaporating.

Through customer research, we discovered brokers weren’t buying “agent management tools”, they were buying transaction enablement. Their revenue came from closed deals, not agent headcount.

We rebuilt pricing around Estimated Annual Transactions instead of agents. For most customers, annual fees stayed the same—but now the pricing aligned with their economics instead of fighting it. When brokerages grew transactions, pricing scaled naturally. When they consolidated agents, pricing wasn’t penalized.

Why I Do This Work

I’ve spent 20+ years at formation points where a technology capability or organizational complexity creates uncertainty about business value.

Early employee at web agencies when nobody knew how to price digital work.
Six years at Cargill coaching 30+ internal ventures on go-to-market strategy, including recommending we kill ventures when customer research showed no real demand.
Worked with numerous product teams struggling because they over-invested in product and under-invested in understanding their customers.

I launched Pricing from the Start after watching too many software products fail not because of poor execution, but because pricing was treated as an afterthought instead of anchored to customer value from the beginning.

Right now, LLMs and economic pressure are creating the same pattern at scale: external forces breaking existing business models, creating acute uncertainty about what customers actually value.

This is the moment where customer value clarity matters most—before companies commit to directions that don’t align with how customers actually buy.

My work has been featured in eight books on marketing and digital products, including Noah Kagan’s Million Dollar Weekend. I write “For Starters” on Substack about getting to customer value before we get too much further.

This Probably Isn’t For You If…

Your business model is stable and you just want incremental optimization
You’re a single-product company under $25M revenue (not enough complexity)
You want guaranteed revenue outcomes (I provide clarity; execution is yours)
You need six-month consulting engagements with $150K+ budgets
You want someone to validate decisions you’ve already made

I work with leaders willing to change direction based on what customer research reveals—even when findings are uncomfortable.

Let’s Talk

I take 6-8 engagements per year.

If your seat-based pricing is breaking, you’ve inherited portfolio chaos from acquisitions, or you’re watching revenue per customer decline while value delivered increases—let’s figure out what customers are actually buying.

Schedule a Call