Aligning pricing with the work, not the org chart
Most SaaS pricing pages have a “per user / month” line somewhere. Slack does it. Notion does it. Salesforce did it for
two decades. The model is so familiar that “$15 per user per month” reads as a normal sentence.
We thought about it. We decided not to. Here’s why.
The work doesn’t scale with the team size
Imagine two finance teams. One is five people at a 30-person startup. The other is fifty people at a 500-person midmarket company. Both are responsible for incident reporting and compliance for their respective organizations.
How many incidents does each team file per quarter? Roughly the same. Maybe 20-40 incidents at the startup.
Maybe 30-60 at the larger company. The variance is wide, but the order of magnitude is similar. Compliance work
doesn’t grow linearly with headcount. It grows with company size, regulatory exposure, and industry.
Now look at per-seat pricing. The startup team pays for 5 seats. The mid-market team pays for 50 seats. At $15 per
seat per month, that’s $75 vs. $750. The larger team pays 10x more for roughly the same volume of work.
Where does that 10x go? It doesn’t go to feature differentiation. The startup team uses the same incident form, the
same workflow rules, the same audit trail. It goes to vendor margin. The vendor is happy to take it, because the larger
company can afford it.
The result is that per-seat pricing punishes teams that grow. It also pushes finance teams to keep the product
confined to “just the compliance person” instead of getting the rest of the team to file incidents directly, which
defeats the entire point.
What we charge for instead
We charge for the variable costs that actually scale with work: outbound emails (notifications, weekly digests,
workflow rule sends) and AI insights (Gemini-assisted summaries and prevention guidance). Both are real costs to us.
SendGrid bills us per email tier. Google bills us per AI call. We pass those costs through with a margin that covers
infrastructure and support.
Every plan includes unlimited users and every feature. You can add 50 people to a Team-plan organization without
thinking about it. They can all file incidents. They all get the audit trail. They all get notifications.
What scales with the plan is the volume meter:
- Free: 100 emails / month, 5 AI insights / month
- Team ($79/mo): 2,000 emails, 50 AI insights
- Business ($249/mo): 10,000 emails, 300 AI insights
If your team files lots of incidents and runs lots of automations (workflow rules that email approvers, weekly digests
to 20 admins), you’ll use more emails and pay for a higher tier. If you have a quiet quarter, you stay on a lower tier.
The bill matches the work.
The trade-offs we accepted
We’re not pretending this model is strictly better. It has costs.
First, predictability. Per-seat is easier to budget for. You know exactly what your bill will be next month. With a
metered model, your bill varies if your incident volume varies. We mitigate this with soft caps (an in-app banner at
80% of your meter), hard caps (the meter pauses at 100% so you can’t blow past your plan), and clear overage rates if
you choose to pay through.
Second, complexity. Per-seat is one number to communicate. Metered is two. Our pricing page has to explain what
counts toward emails and what counts toward AI insights, which is more cognitive load on a prospect.
Third, finance department surprise. A finance lead used to per-seat tools has to mentally translate to the new
model. We’ve heard “wait, no per-user fee?” more than once in sales conversations. It’s not a bug; it’s a conversation
we have to have.
Why we still think it’s the right call
Because the work matters more than the seat count. Because finance teams shouldn’t be penalized for growing.
Because a small team and a mid-market team using the same product should pay according to what they’re doing,
not who’s logged in.
We also think it’s the honest model for AI features specifically. AI is a real variable cost (every Gemini call has a dollar
amount attached). Pretending it’s bundled into “the platform” hides the cost. Charging per insight makes it visible. If
a customer is generating hundreds of insights per month, they can see exactly what that’s costing them, and they
have the option to bring their own AI key (see the BYOK post) if they’d rather pay Google directly.
The shape of the bet
Per-seat works for the vendor when most customers are large. Metered works for the vendor when most customers
are small. Our target customer is small and mid-sized businesses, broadly. Industry and role don’t matter; the
workflow does. If you’ve been quietly tired of explaining to leadership why the compliance tool bill keeps growing as
you add people, this is for you.
If you’re at a 500-person company and per-seat is genuinely a better fit for your procurement process, we can talk on
Enterprise. But we won’t pretend it’s our default.
