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Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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Most B2B SaaS companies shop for billing software (Togai, Stripe Billing, Chargebee) when they should first fix their pricing strategy. Here's the brutal truth: billing platforms perfectly execute whatever pricing you configure—even if it's costing you 30–40% of potential revenue. Before spending $2–10K/month on billing infrastructure, invest 6–12 weeks validating your pricing model, value metrics, and packaging with actual customer research. The companies that win do strategy first, implementation second. Otherwise, you're just automating broken pricing faster.
You’re probably here because you’re actively evaluating SaaS billing software—maybe Googling Togai reviews, Stripe Billing pricing, or Chargebee vs Togai vs Stripe.
You’re comparing features, metering capabilities, and integration docs.
But there’s one uncomfortable question almost nobody asks:
Are you about to automate the wrong pricing model?
The Question Nobody Asks (But Everyone Should)
You’re doing what most teams do:
- Shortlisting Togai vs. Stripe Billing vs. Chargebee
- Skimming G2 and Capterra ratings
- Asking the RevOps Slack channel what “stack” people use
- Worrying about migration, invoices, taxes, and dunning
All of that matters. But if you haven’t done serious work on your pricing strategy before billing, you’re at real risk of making a very expensive mistake.
Why this article might frustrate you (and why you should read it anyway)
This is a pattern-interrupt.
You came here in “procurement mode” and now someone is telling you to slow down and look at your pricing first. That’s annoying.
But here’s why you should keep reading:
- You’re about to lock in infrastructure that will be hard and expensive to unwind
- Billing platforms will obediently execute whatever you tell them—even if that pricing is killing your expansion revenue
- The cost of fixing bad pricing after implementation is usually 10–20x higher than doing it right upfront
The pattern: companies that rush to billing infrastructure
We see the same story over and over:
- Company hits $3M, $10M, $30M ARR
- Pricing has grown “organically” (a polite word for “randomly”)
- Complexity spikes: hybrid deals, bespoke discounts, mixed models
- Finance and RevOps are drowning in spreadsheets → “We need billing software”
- They evaluate Togai, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Recurly, etc.
- They pick the one that best fits their current pricing mess
- They spend 2–6 months implementing
- Only then do they realize:
- The value metric is wrong
- Packaging is misaligned with customer value
- Competitor pricing is eating them alive
- Sales is discounting away 30–50% of list price
And now those problems are embedded inside an expensive billing system.
What happens when you have perfect billing execution of imperfect pricing
Think of billing infrastructure for SaaS as a precision machine:
- It will meter every API call, GB, seat, or credit exactly as configured
- It will apply every discount, tier, and overage rule flawlessly
- It will ship invoices like clockwork
If the strategy is wrong, this just means:
- You churn customers faster with perfectly accurate bills they resent
- You leave 20–40% revenue on the table, now at scale
- You make future pricing changes slower, riskier, and more political (“But engineering just finished the implementation!”)
Real example (anonymized):
- B2B SaaS, $15M ARR, mid-market focus
- Rushed into a sophisticated usage-based billing implementation
- Never validated their value metric or packaging with customers
- 6 months of product + engineering + RevOps time
- Post-launch results:
- Deal cycles lengthened
- Churn ticked up
- Sales leaned even harder on discounts to “undo” bad pricing
- By the time they hired a pricing consultant, they’d burned:
- ~$250K in tooling + implementation costs
- ~$1.8M+ in lost/foregone revenue
The billing platform did exactly what it was told. The strategy was the problem.
The 7 Signs You’re Not Ready for Billing Software Yet
Use this as a diagnostic checklist. If several of these feel uncomfortably familiar, you should pause any Togai/Stripe/Chargebee contract and sort out your pricing first—ideally with a SaaS pricing consultant.
1. You haven’t validated your pricing with customer research in the last 12 months
- What this means: You’re building billing infrastructure on assumptions, not data.
- Consequence: Billing platforms will perfectly execute pricing that customers quietly (or loudly) hate.
- What to do before you buy billing software:
- Run Van Westendorp price sensitivity analysis or conjoint analysis
- Talk to a statistically meaningful sample of customers and lost deals
- Validate not just willingness to pay, but what they’re willing to pay for
2. Your team is still debating usage-based vs. subscription vs. hybrid
- What this means: You haven’t made a strategic decision on your pricing model.
- Consequence:
- Billing platforms support all models. None of them will tell you which is right.
- In practice, you’ll choose based on what’s easiest to implement, not what best aligns with customer value.
- What to do:
- Run a structured pricing model evaluation:
- Analyze usage patterns
- Study competitor approaches (and why they chose them)
- Map models to your customer segments and value drivers
- Decide on subscription, usage, or hybrid based on evidence—not engineering constraints.
3. You’re not confident about your value metric
- What this means: You’re still asking: “Should we charge per user, per GB, per transaction, per workspace, per API call, or something else?”
- Consequence:
- Wrong value metric = constant friction, arguments about fairness, and surprise invoices.
- No billing platform can fix a value metric that doesn’t match how customers perceive value.
- What to do:
- Analyze product usage data to see what scales with successful outcomes
- Conduct customer interviews to understand how they mentally model value
- Test different value metrics through pilots or structured research
4. Your sales team is negotiating wild discounts with no guardrails
- What this means: Discounts vary wildly by rep, deal size, and mood.
- Consequence:
- Billing automation will just make it easier to invoice inconsistent, opaque pricing.
- When customers compare notes, trust erodes and renewals get ugly.
- What to do:
- Build a discount framework:
- Max discretionary discount by role
- Rules for term-based and volume-based discounts
- Clear trade-offs (e.g., “more discount for longer term and upfront payment”)
- Roll out sales enablement and deal desk guidelines before implementation.
5. You can’t explain why your pricing is structured the way it is
- What this means: Pricing is a set of legacy decisions, one-off deals, and “what felt right at the time.”
- Consequence:
- A billing platform will harden these historical accidents into your operating system.
- Changing later will be more painful (technically, financially, and politically).
- What to do:
- Document the strategic rationale behind:
- Each pricing model
- Each tier
- Each major add-on and discount band
- If you can’t explain it clearly, that’s a red flag you need strategy work.
6. Your competitors have completely different pricing approaches and you don’t know why
- What this means: Competitor A is per-seat, B is usage-based, C is freemium + premium add-ons—and you don’t have a clear view of their logic.
- Consequence:
- You can’t position against them coherently.
- You may be sailing into a pricing war blind.
- What to do:
- Run a competitive pricing analysis:
- Tear down competitor pricing pages and contracts
- Infer who they’re optimized for
- Analyze where you can credibly differentiate (not just “we’re cheaper”)
7. You’re choosing billing software based on which one makes your current pricing easiest to implement
- What this means: You’re letting infrastructure dictate strategy.
- Consequence:
- You optimize for “implementation convenience” rather than “long-term revenue and customer alignment.”
- You might pick Stripe Billing because it’s easiest with your current stack, when your optimal pricing requires Togai-level metering—or vice versa.
- What to do:
- Define your ideal future-state pricing first:
- Model, metrics, tiers, discounts, regionalization
- Then evaluate Stripe Billing alternatives, Togai, Chargebee, or custom build against those requirements.
If you mentally checked 3 or more of these boxes, you’re not ready for billing software yet. You need pricing strategy first.
Get Your Pricing Readiness Assessment
Thinking about buying billing software? Book a 30-minute assessment first. We’ll review your pricing strategy, tell you if you’re ready for implementation or if you need strategy work first, and help you avoid expensive mistakes. No pressure, no sales pitch—just honest guidance on what you actually need.
[Book Free Assessment →]
Or, if you’re not ready to talk yet, download the checklist: “Are You Ready for Billing Software?” and score yourself.
What Billing Platforms Actually Do (And What They Don’t)
Let’s be crystal clear: Togai, Stripe Billing, and Chargebee are excellent tools. This article is not a hit piece. It’s about the division of labor.
What They Do Brilliantly
Modern SaaS billing software is incredibly capable. Platforms like Togai, Stripe Billing, and Chargebee excel at:
- Metering and aggregating usage data across multiple dimensions (API calls, seats, storage, credits, etc.)
- Applying complex rating logic:
- Tiered pricing
- Volume and commitment discounts
- Overages and minimums
- Generating accurate invoices at scale
- Integrating with:
- Payment processors (Stripe Payments, Adyen, etc.)
- Accounting/ERP systems
- CRM and RevOps tools
- Powering customer-facing usage dashboards
- Handling multi-currency, taxes, and compliance
- Supporting multiple billing models:
- Subscription
- Pure usage-based
- Hybrid
- Managing:
- Prepaid credits and drawdowns
- Minimum commitments
- Complex enterprise contracts and amendments
In other words: once you know what you want to charge and how you want to structure it, these platforms are the industrial-grade machinery that makes it all work.
What They Don’t Do (And Aren’t Designed To)
What they categorically do not do is:
- Tell you what price to charge
- Validate your pricing with real customers
- Choose your value metric
- Design your packaging tiers
- Decide what goes into Good / Better / Best
- Define your discount strategy or approval workflows
- Position you against competitors
- Conduct willingness-to-pay research
- Advise you on pricing model transformation
- Quantify the revenue impact of pricing changes
They assume you already know:
- Who you’re selling to
- How they derive value
- How they want to consume and pay for that value
- Where your economics and their willingness to pay intersect
The key analogy
Billing platforms are like industrial kitchens.
- They can execute any recipe at massive scale.
- They will produce thousands of dishes per hour, with incredible consistency.
- But they:
- Don’t invent the menu
- Don’t decide which dishes your target customers actually want
- Don’t set the prices on the menu
If you give them a bad recipe, you just get bad food faster.
The Real Cost of Getting This Sequence Wrong
So what actually happens when companies implement billing infrastructure before nailing their pricing strategy?
Here are three anonymized but very real scenarios.
Case 1: The Premature Usage-Based Migration
- Company: Series B SaaS, $8M ARR
- Context: Moving from simple per-seat pricing to “modern” usage-based
- What they did:
- Bought Togai for its powerful metering and rating engine
- Spent 3 months of product + engineering + RevOps on implementation
- Launched new usage-based pricing across most new deals
- Strategic miss:
- Never validated which usage metric customers actually cared about
- Chose API calls because:
- It was easy to meter
- It matched how engineering thought about the product
- Customer reaction:
- High-value customers hated being charged per “noisy” API call
- Some saw usage spikes unrelated to value → surprise bills
- Sales was inundated with “Can we do flat-rate?” negotiations
- Outcome:
- 6 months later, they rolled back the model for key segments
- Costs:
- ~$180K in platform + implementation fees
- ~$1.5M in lost revenue from:
- Discounting to save deals
- Delayed contracts
- Elevated churn
- Lesson: The Togai implementation was technically flawless. The pricing strategy was wrong.
Case 2: The Over-Engineered Simple Problem
- Company: Early-stage PLG, $600K ARR
- Context: Straightforward per-seat product, no complex contracts
- What they did:
- Bought an enterprise-grade billing platform because they wanted to “grow into it”
- Spent $8K/month on infrastructure
- Strategic miss:
- Never questioned whether per-seat was even the right model
- Didn’t have meaningful pricing tiers or usage complexity
- Outcome:
- 2 years later, still:
- On per-seat pricing
- Overpaying massively for billing capabilities they didn’t use
- Meanwhile, a competitor launched with a usage-based model better aligned to value and started growing 3x faster
- Lesson: Wrong pricing model + expensive billing = double waste.
Case 3: The Discount Disaster
- Company: Enterprise SaaS, $22M ARR
- Context: Complex contracts, sales-led, multi-year deals
- What they did:
- Implemented Stripe Billing to simplify quoting and invoicing
- Strategic miss:
- Underlying discounting behavior remained chaotic:
- Sales reps discounting anywhere from 20–60%
- No clear approval rules
- Inconsistent terms by region and rep
- Outcome:
- Stripe Billing faithfully invoiced every custom discount
- But:
- Customers compared notes and found huge discrepancies
- Procurement teams lost trust
- Legal got dragged into disputes
- Board started questioning pricing discipline
- They eventually:
- Hired a pricing consultant
- Rebuilt discount strategy
- Re-implemented parts of Stripe Billing to match the new model
- Lesson: Billing automation doesn’t fix strategic dysfunction. It just exposes it.
The cost summary: what “getting it wrong” really looks like
Direct costs:
- Billing platform: $2–10K/month for 6–24 months before fixing strategy
- Implementation:
- 1–3 months of engineering + RevOps + product
- Opportunity cost of features not shipped
- Migration:
- Moving customers to a wrong pricing model
- Rollback:
- Re-doing implementation when strategy finally changes
Indirect costs:
- 20–40% potential revenue left on the table with suboptimal pricing
- Churn from:
- Misaligned value metrics
- Perceived unfairness
- Lower win rates and longer sales cycles
- Customer dissatisfaction → support fire drills
- Competitors getting pricing right while you’re fighting internal fires
- Erosion of board and investor confidence
For a mid-market SaaS company, the all-in cost of bad sequencing is usually:
$500K–$2M in the first year alone
The Right Sequence: Strategy → Validation → Implementation
Companies that get this right follow a simple, disciplined order of operations.
Phase 1: Pricing Strategy & Design (6–12 weeks)
What happens:
- Competitive pricing analysis and positioning
- Customer segmentation and value driver identification
- Value metric selection with quantitative validation
- Willingness-to-pay research:
- Conjoint analysis
- Van Westendorp price sensitivity
- Packaging and tier design
- Discount framework and guardrails
- Migration strategy for existing customers
- Financial modeling and revenue projections
Deliverable:
A validated pricing strategy with customer data backing every major decision.
Investment:
Roughly $50K–$300K depending on size and complexity.
ROI:
Typically 10–20x in the first year through better monetization and lower leakage.
Who does it:
Experienced pricing strategy consultants (e.g., Monetizely, Simon-Kucher, etc.) working with your internal team.
Phase 2: Billing Infrastructure Selection (2–4 weeks)
What happens:
- Translate strategy into requirements:
- Value metrics
- Pricing models
- Billing frequencies
- Regionalization and currencies
- Evaluate platforms:
- Togai vs Stripe vs Chargebee vs build
- Map integrations:
- CRM
- Data warehouse
- Product analytics
- Accounting
- Negotiate contracts and scope
Deliverable:
A billing platform choice that can actually execute your strategic pricing.
Investment:
Relatively low compared to implementation—mostly evaluation time and vendor calls.
Who does it:
Internal RevOps/Finance/Product, optionally with an implementation partner.
Phase 3: Technical Implementation (6–12 weeks)
What happens:
- Configure plans, tiers, value metrics, discounts
- Build and test integrations:
- CRM
- Payment processors
- Accounting
- Implement usage metering and event pipelines
- Prepare migration tooling
- Update pricing pages and plan selection flows
- Train sales, CS, and finance teams
Deliverable:
A live billing system executing a validated pricing strategy.
Investment:
- Platform fees: $2–10K/month
- Implementation resources:
- Engineering
- RevOps
- Potential external implementation partner
Phase 4: Launch & Optimization (Ongoing)
What happens:
- Phased rollout:
- New customers first
- Then segments of existing customers
- Monitor performance:
- ARPU
- Expansion revenue
- Churn
- Deal cycle time
- Experiment with:
- Offers
- Bundles
- Discount structures
- Quarterly pricing reviews
- Competitive and market monitoring
Deliverable:
A continuously optimized pricing and billing system, not a one-off project.
Key insight:
Phase 1 (strategy) comes before Phase 2 (platform selection). Without that, you’re guessing.
How to Know If You’re Actually Ready for Billing Software
You are ready for Togai, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, or any other platform when you can confidently answer these questions.
1. Can you articulate your pricing strategy in 3 sentences?
Good answer:
“We charge usage-based on API calls because that scales with customer value. We have 3 tiers based on rate limits and support level. We use volume discounts starting at 10M calls/month.”Bad answer:
“We kind of do per-seat but also charge for some usage stuff… it’s complicated.”
2. Do you have customer research backing your value metric?
Good answer:
“We ran conjoint analysis with 200 customers. API calls had a 0.78 correlation with perceived value, about 2x higher than alternative metrics.”Bad answer:
“We think customers care about API calls… it seems like they do?”
3. Can you defend your pricing against your top 3 competitors?
Good answer:
“Competitor A charges per seat but doesn’t scale down for low usage. Competitor B is usage-based but their metric doesn’t match how customers think about outcomes. We’re positioned in between with a hybrid model that better matches value for our ICP.”Bad answer:
“I think we’re cheaper than some people but I’m not sure…”
4. Do you have clear discount guardrails for sales?
Good answer:
“Sales can discount up to 15% on standard terms, 25% for annual prepay, and up to 35% for 3-year contracts over $100K. Anything above that needs VP approval and a strategic justification.”Bad answer:
“Sales just does what they need to do to close deals.”
5. Have you modeled the financial impact of your pricing changes?
Good answer:
“We’ve projected an 18% revenue increase in year one, with cohort-level modeling and sensitivity tests around adoption, churn, and discount rates.”Bad answer:
“We think this will make more money but we haven’t really modeled it.”
6. Do you know how you’ll migrate existing customers?
Good answer:
“High-usage customers move immediately with a 10% incentive. Mid-usage are grandfathered for 12 months. Low-usage move at renewal with targeted outreach.”Bad answer:
“We’ll figure that out during implementation.”
Interpreting your answers
All (or almost all) good answers:
You’re ready. Go buy your billing platform and focus on execution quality.Mostly bad answers:
Stop. You need pricing strategy first. Billing software now will lock in your guesswork.Mixed:
Start a strategy engagement now, and in parallel keep light-touch evaluation of billing platforms to speed Phase 2 later.
Get Your Pricing Readiness Assessment
Not sure where you land? Get a 30-minute pricing readiness assessment.
We’ll walk through these questions with you, identify gaps, and tell you plainly whether you’re ready for billing software—or need to shore up strategy first.
[Book Free Assessment →]
Prefer self-serve? Download the “Are You Ready for Billing Software?” checklist and score your team before you sign anything.
What a Pricing Strategy Engagement Actually Looks Like
If you’ve never hired a SaaS pricing consultant, the process can sound vague. It’s not. Done right, it’s structured, rigorous, and data-driven.
Here’s a typical 6–12 week engagement.
1. Discovery (1–2 weeks)
Activities:
- Current pricing and performance review
- Customer segmentation and usage data analysis
- Competitive landscape mapping
- Stakeholder interviews:
- Sales
- Customer success
- Product
- Finance
- Historical analysis:
- Win/loss reasons
- Discount patterns
- Churn cohorts
Outcome:
Clear understanding of your current state, constraints, and opportunities.
2. Research (3–4 weeks)
Activities:
- Qualitative customer interviews:
- How they perceive value
- How they budget
- What they compare you against
- Quantitative pricing research:
- Conjoint analysis or Van Westendorp
- Competitor teardown:
- Pricing structure
- Packaging
- Positioning
- Value metric testing with real customer cohorts
- Win/loss analysis focused on pricing objections
Outcome:
Data-backed insight into who values what, and how much they’re willing to pay.
3. Strategy Design (2–3 weeks)
Activities:
- Pricing model recommendation:
- Subscription vs. usage vs. hybrid
- Value metric selection:
- With clear rationale and risk analysis
- Packaging and tier design:
- Good / Better / Best
- Add-ons
- Enterprise/custom layers
- Discount strategy & guardrails
- Competitive positioning framework
- Financial modeling and projections
Outcome:
A complete pricing strategy and migration roadmap you can execute.
4. Enablement (1–2 weeks)
Activities:
- Sales enablement:
- Objection handling
- Talk tracks
- Battlecards
- Customer communication plan:
- Announcements
- FAQ
- Renewal playbooks
- Pricing page recommendations (and copy)
- Deal desk playbooks
- Migration planning:
- Segments
- Timelines
- Incentives
Outcome:
Your organization is ready to launch new pricing with confidence.
Typical timeline, investment, and deliverables
- Timeline: 6–12 weeks from kickoff to “ready to implement”
- Investment: $50K–$300K, depending on size, complexity, and research depth
- Deliverables:
- Validated pricing strategy document
- Customer research reports and raw data
- Financial models and revenue projections
- Sales playbooks and enablement materials
- Implementation roadmap
- Billing platform requirements to drive Phase 2
The Billing Platform Comparison (Once You’re Ready)
After strategy is clear, then it makes sense to compare Togai, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, and other platforms.
Here’s a high-level view.
Stripe Billing
Best for:
- Simple to moderate pricing complexity
- Teams already using Stripe Payments
- Subscription + light usage/hybrid
Strengths:
- Easy to implement in the Stripe ecosystem
- Strong developer experience
- Good for:
- Subscriptions
- Basic usage add-ons
- Lower friction for early-stage companies
Limitations:
- Less flexible for complex usage metering
- Rating engine is more limited vs. dedicated usage-based platforms
- Can get expensive as volumes and complexity scale
Typical cost:
~0.5–1.5% of revenue processed, depending on setup.
Togai
Best for:
- Complex usage-based billing software needs
- Multiple value metrics and dimensions
- AI/API/infrastructure products
- Enterprise contracts with nuanced pricing
Strengths:
- Sophisticated metering and rating engine
- Highly flexible pricing configuration
- Purpose-built for modern usage-based and hybrid models
- Strong fit for:
- API-first
- Infrastructure
- Data platforms
Limitations:
- Overkill for simple seat-based subscription models
- Steeper learning curve
- Requires more thoughtful implementation
Typical cost:
~$2–10K/month, depending on volume and complexity.
Chargebee
Best for:
- Subscription-first businesses with some usage components
- Global SaaS with standard subscription complexity
Strengths:
- Mature subscription management
- Good internationalization and tax support
- Strong revenue recognition tools
Limitations:
- Usage metering is newer and less robust than usage-native platforms
- Can get complex if you’re primarily usage-based
Typical cost:
Platform fee + ~0.5–1% of revenue, depending on plan and scale.
How to choose the right platform
Once your pricing strategy is locked, evaluate platforms against:
- Ability to support your validated value metrics
- Fit with your pricing model (subscription, usage, hybrid)
- Integration with:
- Data infrastructure
- CRM
- ERP
- Implementation resources you have (or can hire)
- Long-term flexibility for:
- New pricing experiments
- New product lines
- Regional variants
Key point:
The “best” billing platform for you depends entirely on your pricing strategy. That’s why strategy has to come first.
Common Objections (And Why They’re Wrong)
You might be thinking one (or several) of these right now.
“We can’t afford both a pricing consultant AND billing software.”
You can’t afford not to do pricing strategy first.
- Typical revenue lift from getting pricing right: 5–15%+ in year one (McKinsey and others have published similar findings)
- Typical revenue loss from bad pricing: 20–40% of potential revenue
Would you rather:
- Spend $100K on strategy that adds $2M+ in incremental revenue
- Or spend $500K–$1M+ on billing and go-to-market motions that execute the wrong pricing model?
“We’ll start with the billing platform and adjust pricing later if needed.”
In reality:
- Pricing changes after implementation are 10x harder:
- Customer migrations
- Contract amendments
- Engineering rework
- Sales confusion
- You might discover your chosen platform doesn’t support the pricing you should have, which means:
- More re-implementation
- Potential platform switch
Better to get the recipe right, then buy the kitchen.
“Our pricing is simple—we don’t need a consultant.”
Simple pricing isn’t the same as right pricing.
- Per-seat can be “simple” yet massively misaligned with value
- Many companies discover that:
- Usage-based
- Hybrid
- Or multi-dimensional pricing
dramatically improves net revenue retention
Without research, “simple” is often just “unexamined.”
“We’ll figure out pricing strategy internally while implementing billing.”
This almost never works.
- Implementation timelines and technical constraints start driving strategic decisions:
- “We can’t do that, it’ll add 4 weeks”
- “Let’s just use seats for now, it’s easier”
Instead of:
“What’s the right strategy?” you end up with:
“What’s not too annoying to implement in the time we have?”
“Our competitors use [Platform X], so we should too.”
Your competitors might:
- Have a completely different pricing strategy and ICP
- Be executing bad pricing as efficiently as you’re about to
Pick the infrastructure that best executes your strategy, not someone else’s.
“This will slow us down—we need to move fast.”
Fast in the wrong direction is not speed; it’s waste.
- 6–8 weeks of pricing work now can save you:
- 6–24 months of painful rework
- Hundreds of thousands (or millions) in lost revenue and sunk costs
- You can still:
- Advance technical discovery
- Prepare data pipelines
- Plan migrations conceptually
…while you validate pricing.
Get Your Pricing Readiness Assessment
If any of these objections sound like internal conversations you’re having, it’s a signal to pause.
Book a 30-minute pricing strategy assessment and we’ll:
- Review your current pricing reality
- Identify if you’re actually ready for billing software
- Recommend next steps—whether that’s strategy work or straight to implementation
No pressure, no hard sell. Just grounded advice.
[Book Free Assessment →]
Or grab the “15 Questions to Answer Before Buying Billing Software” checklist to take back to your team.
Your Action Plan: The Right Next Steps
Here’s what to do based on where you are right now.
Scenario 1: You haven’t started evaluating billing platforms yet
Do this:
- Start with a pricing strategy assessment
- Don’t spend cycles on Togai/Stripe/Chargebee comparisons yet
- Plan for:
- 6–12 weeks of pricing work
- 2–4 weeks of platform selection afterward
Scenario 2: You’re actively comparing Togai / Stripe / Chargebee right now
Do this:
- Hit pause on vendor selection
- Run through the readiness checklist above
- If you can’t confidently answer those questions:
- Put RFPs on hold
- Invest in pricing strategy first
- If you can confidently answer them:
- Proceed with platform demos and technical discovery
Scenario 3: You’ve already bought a billing platform but haven’t implemented
Good news: You’re early enough to fix this.
Do this:
- Before deep configuration:
- Validate or redesign your pricing strategy
- Use that strategy to:
- Configure plans, tiers, and metrics correctly
- Decide what not to overcomplicate
- If you discover you chose the wrong platform:
- It’s painful—but better to change now than post-launch
Scenario 4: You’ve implemented billing and it’s not working
You’re in the expensive zone, but it’s still salvageable.
Do this:
- Conduct a pricing strategy review:
- Survey customers
- Analyze cohort performance by pricing plan
- Design a migration plan to a validated pricing model
- Evaluate whether your current platform can support the new strategy:
- If yes: reconfigure
- If no: plan gradual transition
Universal next step
Regardless of your situation:
Book a 30-minute pricing strategy assessment.
We’ll help you understand:
- If you’re ready for Togai, Stripe Billing, or Chargebee
- Whether you need strategy work first
- What the ROI of each path looks like
Even if the honest answer is, “You’re good—go buy billing software,” we’ll tell you that.
Conclusion: Strategy First, Infrastructure Second, Success Always
Here’s the core truth:
- Billing platforms (Togai, Stripe Billing, Chargebee, etc.) are powerful, necessary tools for scaling SaaS
- They will perfectly execute the pricing you configure
- If that pricing is wrong, you just fail more efficiently and more expensively
The companies that win:
- Do pricing strategy first
- Validate:
- Value metrics
- Packaging
- Discount structures
- Willingness to pay
- Then select and implement billing infrastructure that supports that strategy
For a typical mid-market SaaS, getting this sequence wrong costs:
- $500K–$2M+ in the first year
- 6–24 months of avoidable pain
Spending 6–12 weeks upfront to get pricing right isn’t a detour. It’s the fastest path to scalable, profitable growth—and to choosing the right billing platform for your future, not your past.
Get Your Pricing Readiness Assessment
Before you sign that contract with Togai, Stripe, or Chargebee, make sure you’re automating the right pricing.
Get Your Pricing Readiness Assessment
Thinking about buying billing software? Book a 30-minute assessment first. We’ll review your pricing strategy, tell you if you’re ready for implementation or if you need strategy work first, and help you avoid expensive mistakes. No pressure, no sales pitch—just honest guidance on what you actually need.
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