Put Your Price on the Website, Then Discount It 70%

The Framework

Most early founders keep pricing private and quote per deal. It feels safer. You can read the buyer, size the opportunity, and avoid leaving money on the table.

It also means every negotiation starts from nothing, and a first-time founder is the least equipped person in the room to run it.

Shahar Azulay took the opposite route at groundcover. After a few months he set a public list price, put it on the website, and then discounted it heavily to win deals. The list price was never the number he expected to get. It was the number that gave both sides something to negotiate against.

The Four Steps

1. Pick a unit the customer already counts. groundcover charges per monitored host, not per gigabyte of data. Shahar's whole thesis is that volume-based pricing changes customer behavior for the worse: "It changes the behavior of customers on how they consume telemetry." A unit the buyer can count before signing removes the fear of an unpredictable bill.

2. Publish the number. groundcover listed $30 per host per month openly. Shahar is clear this is a fit question, not a universal rule: private pricing, where every negotiation is its own art, fits the enterprise. "But we were selling heavily to mid-market at the beginning."

3. Let the sensor size the deal. Once installed, groundcover could see the host count, so the conversation moved from what the product was worth to arithmetic. The tradeoff is real: sometimes the environment is smaller than expected, and what looked like a $50K deal turns out to be $10K.

4. Discount without apology. Shahar assumed experienced buyers would read his stage correctly: an experienced procurement person knows you are an early-stage startup and expects up to a 70% discount. "It's fine." The list price still did its job, because the discount is measured against something.

Real Numbers

List price: $30 per host per month, published.

Discount taken on early deals: up to 70%.

Customers to first $1M ARR: roughly 50.

Shahar's own summary of the period: "We undersold the product, but we sold the product."

That is the tradeoff stated plainly. The revenue per customer was poor. The volume of closed deals, reference logos, and completed procurement cycles was not.

When It Fails

This breaks when you sell enterprise. Shahar scopes it himself to mid-market, companies under about a thousand employees. In enterprise, every deal is bespoke, the negotiation is the craft, and a public number caps you before you start.

It also fails if your unit does not correlate with value. Price per host works because hosts approximate how much infrastructure a customer needs watched. Pick a unit that does not track value and you will underprice your best customers and overprice your worst.

The signal to switch: you are consistently discounting more than 70%, or your biggest accounts cost you more to serve than they pay.

Your First Move

Write down the one unit your customer already counts before they meet you. Servers, seats, locations, orders.

Then price against it, publish the number, and let your next three deals close at whatever discount it takes. You are buying the anchor, not the margin.