Pricing is, arguably, the lever with the highest return and the least investment in SaaS. Most companies are obsessed with attracting more customers and improving the product, while leaving their prices untouched for years. A well-designed pricing experiment can increase ARR by 20–30% with no additional cost.
The principles that matter
Value-based pricing, not cost-plus: pricing is not determined by how much it costs you to produce the service. It is determined by the value it creates for the customer. If your product saves the customer 5.000€/month, charging 500€/month is theft (from you).
Plans with anchoring: three plans work better than two or four. The middle plan becomes the «favourite». The expensive plan makes the middle one seem reasonable. The cheap plan exists to provide a base, but is not actively promoted.
Billing based on value consumed vs flat billing: For SaaS B2B, usage-based billing (per user, per consumption, per feature) scales better in line with the value the customer receives. Models such as “per active user” or “per API call” align your revenue with the actual value delivered.
Upward anchor: prices ending in 7 or 9 perform better than those ending in 0.. 49€ is perceived as cheaper than 50€, even if the difference is negligible. 99€ vs 100€ is the classic example.
Experimentation with AI
Predictive models can help optimise pricing: identifying which customer segments are priced below their value, which plans generate more LTV, and which pricing captures more market without touching margins. For SaaS companies with sufficient data (several thousand customers), ML applied to pricing is among the highest-ROI projects.