Why He Threw Out Per-Seat Pricing and Charges for Results

What Everyone Says

Charge per seat. It's the SaaS default. Every pricing page you've ever seen does it: a number, times the number of users, per month. It's predictable, it's easy to forecast, and it's what investors expect to see. Nobody gets fired for pricing per seat.

So most founders never question it. They pick a per-seat number early, and move on.

Why That's Wrong

Per-seat pricing charges for access, not outcomes. The customer pays the same whether your product makes them money or sits unused. That gap is exactly where the sales friction lives, because now you're asking someone to pay you regardless of whether you deliver.

Julius Körfgen saw a cleaner pitch. If you charge for access, "you earn money regardless of your performance, and you can see how you earn money." The customer is carrying all the risk. That's a harder thing to sell, and it puts you on the opposite side of the table from the person you're trying to win.

What Julius Did Instead

He threw out seat-based pricing at Uplane and built the fee in two parts.

A fixed fee that only covers costs: "this is something where we don't earn any money, or super thin margin." And a variable success fee tied to a share of ad spend, which is where Uplane actually makes money.

The logic he pitches to customers is disarming: "I'm not gonna earn, you're just covering my costs, and I'm gonna earn money when you earn money." When the campaigns work, the customer moves more budget onto them, and Uplane's cut grows with it.

Julius is clear this made selling easier, not harder: "It made the pitch in my opinion way easier and takes a little bit of risk away from the client." The model got Uplane to a million dollars in ARR in about six months. It also means a bad month is a bad month for Uplane too, which is the risk he chose to carry to get into the market.

The Principle Underneath

Aligned incentives are a sales argument, not just an ethics one. When your fee moves with the customer's outcome, you stop being a cost they're evaluating and start being a partner who only wins if they win. That flips the conversation.

But it only works if the outcome is measurable and mostly yours to influence. Uplane runs the ads, builds the landing pages, and gives clients daily reporting on every ad and its cost per result. They can see the number. If you can't tie your fee to something the customer already tracks and trusts, the model collapses into an argument about attribution every month.

Should You Do This?

Do this if your product drives a number the customer already measures and cares about (revenue, ad performance, cost per result) and you have enough control over that number to stand behind it. The clearer the attribution, the safer the bet.

Skip it if the outcome is fuzzy, slow, or shaped mostly by things outside your product. And know the trade going in: you're taking on the customer's downside to lower their risk of saying yes. Julius decided that was worth it "if you enter a new market." One question to ask yourself: can I point at a number, every month, that both of us agree I moved?