Why SaaS Pricing & Packaging Is the New Growth Frontier
Plus: Updates from Triple Whale and Expensify.
Welcome back to Good Better Best!
This week we’re unpacking why SaaS pricing and packaging are so hot right now. I’ve witnessed this anecdotally, both in the form of more creators and operators talking about pricing and packaging, and an influx of new solutions geared to help SaaS builders leverage pricing and packaging more effectively
I chatted with Schematic CEO, Fynn Glover to break down why its happening.
Before we get there — a quick reminder that later this month, the PricingSaaS Community will be hosting an AMA with Sam Lee. Sam’s led pricing at ServiceNow, Snowflake, and now HubSpot - and is one of the sharpest thinkers I know. Join the PricingSaaS Community to submit questions and attend the live event.
On to this week’s post.
📰 Pricing News & Updates
Triple Whale restructured its pricing page.
Expensify removed a price point.
Today’s Post is brought to you by Schematic — The monetization platform built for product & revenue teams.
Schematic gives product, growth, and sales teams the ability to:
Convert free trialers to paid accounts
Drive expansion with triggered paywalls and alerts
Launch & support any pricing model, from seats to credits
Support custom configuration for enterprise deals
Prevent churn with loyalty credits and discounts
All without pulling in engineering.
Why Pricing and Packaging Are Having a Moment
Anecdotally, it feels like Pricing and Packaging are having a moment.
When I started this newsletter in 2020, there were really only two consistent writers building meaningful audiences around SaaS pricing: Patrick Campbell and Kyle Poyar. Fast forward to today, and there are tons of consultants and operators creating great work about pricing and packaging strategy.
But it’s not just content.
Over the last 5 years, a new crop of startups have emerged to help companies better leverage pricing and packaging. These companies have fresh takes on quote to cash as a whole, including feature management, billing and metering, and ROI calculation.
None of this is happening in isolation and as a student of it all, I’ve thought a lot about why it’s happening, who the players are, and how to make sense of it for SaaS builders who want to set themselves up to leverage pricing going forward.
One of my favorite frameworks for thinking about this comes from the team at Schematic, and the idea of the 3 stacks.
Put simply, the argument suggests that the needs for modern SaaS builders have fundamentally shifted due to three macro factors:
Traditional licensed-based subscriptions are giving way to new models. Infrastructure pioneers like AWS popularized usage-based pricing, which has now permeated numerous SaaS categories. Credit-based pricing models continue gaining traction as flexible consumption options.
Product-Led Growth (PLG) has changed acquisition and expansion dynamics. Customers now expect to be able to start using a product, or upgrade without talking to a sales rep or account manager.
Packaging has gone from monolithic to granular. Customers increasingly expect to only pay for what they need and not have to pay for irrelevant features.
As if that weren’t enough, AI is accelerating these trends further, introducing even more complexity and further recalibrating customer expectations.
The impact is an increasingly inadequate legacy infrastructure stack to manage customer lifecycles:
💰 Sales Stack: Facilitates quoting the customer and the initial contract
🏦 Finance Stack: Manages subscriptions, invoicing and collection of payment.
📊 Product Stack: Fulfills the contract and meters usage
In this post, we'll examine why these established stacks have become inadequate and explore the new product categories that are emerging to help SaaS operators navigate this new pricing paradigm more effectively.
Breaking Down the Pricing and Packaging Tech Stack
Below, we’ll break down each of the 3 stacks, including the components, marketing leaders, key pain points for modern SaaS builders, and the emerging solutions trying to bridge the gap. Disclaimer: this list is not exhaustive — for each stack we honed in on a specific type of emergent solution, and picked a couple up-and-coming platforms that are tackling the challenge.
💰 Sales Stack
Job: Facilitate quoting the customer and the initial contract.
Components: CRM, CPQ, and Contract Management Software
Market Leaders: Salesforce, HubSpot, Salesforce CPQ, DocuSign
Primary Pain Point: The stack is more complex than it needs to be. Emerging solutions aim to solve this architecturally through consolidation.
Emerging Category: Unified Revenue Platforms
Nue.io: Salesforce-native RevOps platform that helps companies manage their entire revenue lifecycle—from quoting and pricing to billing and analytics—across all sales channels. Designed for high-growth SaaS companies and other subscription-based businesses that require flexible pricing strategies and seamless integration with Salesforce to streamline their revenue operations.
MonetizeNow: Unified platform that streamlines quoting, billing, and usage tracking for B2B SaaS companies, enabling seamless revenue operations across all sales channels. Serves B2B SaaS enterprises, especially those with complex pricing models, consumption-based billing, and multi-channel sales strategies, seeking to automate and scale their revenue processes.
🏦 Finance Stack
Job: Manages subscriptions, invoicing and collection of payment.
Components: Payments, Billing Platform, Subscription Management Platform, ERP
Market Leaders: Stripe, Chargebee, Zuora, Netsuite
Primary Pain Point: If you are a rapid scaling SaaS company using Usage-Based Pricing, or have complex, nonstandard metering contracts, you need billing software to support that.
Emerging Category: Usage Based Pricing Power Tools
Metronome: Designed for larger, high-scale SaaS or AI infrastructure companies that need real-time data, granular usage metrics, and enterprise-grade billing capabilities.
Orb: Designed for startup and growth-stage SaaS companies that want to move quickly, offer flexible usage-based pricing, and give both engineering and finance a clean experience.
M3ter: Designed for mid-sized B2B SaaS businesses with complex usage models, needing billing flexibility and strong integration with existing ERP/CRM tools.
📊 Product Stack
Job: Fulfill commercial terms and meter usage.
Components: Entitlement Check & Evaluation, Entitlement Information, Entitlement Administration, Usage Tracking & Modeling
Market Leaders: LaunchDarkly, Retool, Clerk
Primary Pain Point: Access logic is informed by commercial term (subscription term or contract), but storing it in the actual app is cumbersome.
Emerging Category: Monetization Platforms
Schematic: Designed to give startup growth and product teams full control over pricing & packaging without code changes. This includes feature gating, plan configuration, metering, in-app paywalls and alerts, and revenue insights & billing UI.
Stigg: Designed for mid-market & enterprise SaaS companies that want a developer-first platform for embedding pricing and packaging logic into SaaS apps—from entitlements to metering to paywalls.
Editor’s Note: Importantly, neither of the above vendors are trying to replace the existing billing system. Instead, they serve as a monetization layer that decouples pricing from application code and downstream business systems (e.g. billing, CRM, CPQ, and ERP).
Looking Ahead
The rise of usage-based models, PLG dynamics, and granular packaging has made legacy pricing infrastructure feel out of step with how SaaS companies grow today.
In response, a wave of purpose-built startups are rethinking how each stack—Sales, Finance, and Product—should operate in a modern pricing world.
But legacy leaders aren’t sitting idle. Stripe Billing has quickly built up its own capabilities around usage-based pricing, and Zuora acquired Togai to enhance its own usage-based pricing capabilities.
The takeaway?
Companies who will get the most out of pricing & packaging will do more than have strong cross-functional pricing committees – they’ll have invested in the tooling and systems to iterate on pricing & packaging – as is inevitable – with greater frequency, faster time to value, & more confidence, The winners will be those who treat monetization as a product and invest in the infrastructure to iterate fast.
Further Reading:
🎯 Expert Insight
I've been thinking a lot about metrics lately, particularly about what makes a pricing metric viable versus merely theoretical. Sometimes the most fundamental insights get overlooked in the rush toward sophisticated pricing strategies.
Back in 2019, I was working with a SaaS client who had designed this elaborate value-based pricing model that looked brilliant on slides but crumbled completely when we tried implementing it. They simply couldn't measure what they wanted to charge for!
That experience crystalized something for me:
If you can't measure it, it's not a metric.
Operational viability isn't just one consideration among many—it's the very foundation of any pricing structure. I've seen too many companies with elegant pricing theories that fail at execution because they overlooked two critical requirements:
First, you need to measure non-arbitrarily. Both you and your customers need clarity on what's being counted and how. Ambiguity in measurement creates friction, disputes, and ultimately, churn.
Second, you must be able to bill against your metric. This sounds obvious, but I've witnessed numerous companies stumble here. Legacy billing systems were architected for simpler times—they handle flat subscriptions beautifully but break down when confronted with dynamic usage patterns.
This infrastructure gap explains why so many SaaS companies struggle with the transition to usage-based models. Their billing systems simply weren't designed for it. It's fascinating to watch new vendors step into this breach, building systems that handle these complexities natively.
The metric you choose shapes everything downstream—your operations, your customer relationships, even your product development priorities. I've learned to evaluate potential metrics first through this operational lens before moving to more nuanced considerations like value alignment or metric density.
Remember: If your pricing metric can't be consistently measured and reliably billed, it's not strategic. It's hypothetical.
Thanks for tuning in and see you next week!
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