Price on a Value Metric, Not Per Seat

The Framework

Most SaaS founders copy the pricing they see everywhere: charge per seat, per user, per login. It feels safe because it's what everyone does.

Ron Hash priced Skimmer at 50 cents per serviced pool with a $29 minimum. Not per seat. Every competitor in pool service software charged per seat, and he went the other way on purpose.

The idea came from one principle: your price should sit as close to the customer's money as possible, and it should scale with the value they get. A pool company makes money per pool they service. So Skimmer charged per pool. When the customer grew, the bill grew, and that felt fair instead of punishing.

The Steps

1. Find the value metric. Ask what unit actually makes your customer money. For pool companies it was pools serviced. Ron's rule: get the interest completely aligned, so the customer only pays more when they're winning.

2. Reject per-seat if it fights growth. Ron read every post on Price Intelligently and realized per-seat pricing "actually contributes to churn over the long run because people have to think about, do I want to add this person onto my account or not." Per-pool pricing removed that hesitation.

3. Make usage unlimited on everything else. "You want your software product to be pervasive in the company. You want every single person in the company to use it, and for them not to even think about it." Unlimited users made Skimmer stickier.

4. Keep the math simple. A customer with 150 pools paid $75 a month. Ron would just ask "how many pools are you running?" and halve the number. When people pushed back, he said "it's a drop in the bucket," since they were charging at least $100 a month per pool.

Real Numbers

Price: $0.50 per serviced pool, $29 minimum (a 150-pool customer paid $75/month).

Churn: gradually fell to around 2% as the model and product improved.

Customer sentiment: one customer told Ron, "I get happy every time I see my Skimmer bill go up because that means my business is growing." That is what aligned pricing sounds like.

When It Fails

This breaks if you can't find a clean value metric, or if the metric is hard for the customer to count. Ron's worked because "pools" was a number every owner already knew by heart. If your customers can't instantly tell you their unit, or the unit doesn't track the value they get, a usage model just creates confusing bills and pricing anxiety. In that case a simple tiered plan may serve you better.

Your First Move

This week, write down the one unit that makes your customers money. Then look at your current pricing and ask whether it grows when that unit grows, or whether you're charging for seats and logins that have nothing to do with their success. If there's a gap, sketch one usage-based tier priced on that unit and test the sentence "how many [units] are you running?" on your next three sales calls.