.png)
Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
How Did HubSpot and Atlassian Change the Game for SaaS Pricing Strategies
For much of enterprise software history, pricing came late in the buying process. A prospect met a salesperson, explained its requirements, received a quote, negotiated a discount, and only then discovered what the product would actually cost. Atlassian attacked that sequence from the opposite direction. By its 2015 public filing, the company was describing a model in which a customer could price and buy Jira for 10 users or more than 10,000 users from a public list price without speaking to sales.
HubSpot made a different break with convention. It used free products as an entry point, then created paid Hubs and editions that could expand as a customer's marketing, sales, service, content and data needs grew. By 2020, HubSpot was already reporting a mix of base subscriptions, contact thresholds, products and account users; in March 2024 it pushed further towards a common seat structure across its Hubs.
Both companies therefore changed more than a price list. They made pricing part of distribution. Atlassian used transparent per-user pricing to remove the salesperson from much of the initial purchase; HubSpot used free entry and expanding packages to turn one application into a broader customer platform. That approach travelled: Salesforce still prices core Sales Cloud editions per user, while Slack combines a free plan with paid active-user tiers.
Monetizely's position is that HubSpot and Atlassian changed SaaS pricing by linking packaging, the pricing metric and the buying motion tightly enough that pricing itself helped acquire and expand customers. Atlassian executed that idea more cleanly; HubSpot created the broader expansion engine. Their next challenge is the same: preserve that simplicity as AI credits, outcome charges, Collections and new products create more ways to bill.
Atlassian turned a public price list into a distribution advantage
Atlassian's early pricing strategy looks ordinary only because so many SaaS companies later copied its logic. In its 2015 registration filing, Atlassian contrasted its public prices with the opaque pricing of traditional enterprise vendors and said customers could evaluate, purchase and set up Jira without a salesperson. The company paired that transparency with free trials, affordable entry and an online buying path.
The point was not merely customer friendliness. Pricing substituted for sales labour.
By fiscal 2018, Atlassian said the “vast majority” of transactions took place on its website. Its distribution model relied on product quality, automated distribution, transparent pricing and low-touch demand generation, allowing a small initial deployment to spread to other teams, add users and attach additional products.
That mechanism survived Atlassian's move upmarket. The fiscal 2025 10-K still describes a land-and-expand motion built around free or low-priced entry, transparent pricing and automated customer service, while enterprise sales concentrates more heavily on large-account expansion. Atlassian also reported that more than 90% of fiscal 2025 revenue came from accounts that existed by 30 June 2024, and said subscription growth was driven primarily by paid-seat expansion among existing customers and price increases.
The evolution matters because the commercial model has repeatedly absorbed a larger product without abandoning the original entry logic.
| Period | Atlassian pricing move | HubSpot pricing move | Strategic effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015-2018 | Public list pricing, free trials and self-service purchasing from small teams to 10,000+ users. | Freemium and paid Hubs establish free-to-paid expansion; later filings show base subscriptions plus contact, product and user expansion. | Price becomes part of customer acquisition rather than a late sales negotiation. |
| 2019-2020 | Free Cloud editions roll out for Jira, Confluence and Jira Service Desk; Cloud Premium adds a higher-value tier. | CRM platform grows through free products, paid plans, contacts and additional products. | Both widen entry while creating clearer upgrade paths. |
| 2024 | Per-user Cloud pricing remains central as Atlassian scales Premium and Enterprise. | HubSpot moves all Hubs and paid editions towards Core Seats and free View-Only Seats, removing Sales and Service Hub seat minimums. | The seat becomes easier to understand as an expansion unit. |
| 2025-2026 | Jira retains Free, Standard, Premium and Enterprise; Atlassian adds Collections, AI consumption and its proposed Flex model for large enterprises. | HubSpot combines Core Seats, Hub tiers, marketing contacts, HubSpot Credits and, for several agents in 2026, outcome-linked pricing. | Both are moving from simple SaaS pricing towards a platform with several monetisation paths. |
The history shows a common pattern: each company opened the front door first and added monetisation depth afterwards. Atlassian's distinctive achievement was maintaining a recognisable per-user spine while the portfolio expanded.
Current Jira pricing still reflects the pattern. As of 13 August 2026, the public Jira page offers a Free edition for up to 10 users and lists Standard at $7.91 per user per month; Atlassian's licensing documentation says monthly Cloud subscriptions use progressive per-user pricing, while annual subscriptions use user tiers.
Atlassian also solves a problem that many SaaS firms create for themselves at scale. Instead of making every additional user equally expensive forever, its progressive monthly pricing lowers the marginal per-user rate in larger bands. The meter remains obvious even as the effective unit price changes.
HubSpot made packaging carry more expansion than the seat alone could capture
HubSpot's contribution was more complicated, but also more ambitious. A sales collaboration tool can expand largely by adding users. A customer platform spans marketing databases, salespeople, service teams, content operations and increasingly AI agents, so one metric cannot mirror every source of value equally well.
HubSpot solved the problem first through packaging. Customers could enter through free products or a single Hub, then move upwards in edition and outwards into additional Hubs. In its May 2024 earnings call, HubSpot reported that more than 35% of Professional-and-above customers were using three or more Hubs.
The 2024 seat reset made the entry path easier. HubSpot removed seat minimums in Sales Hub and Service Hub, added a common Core Seat for editing access, and introduced free View-Only Seats for people who only needed visibility. The company said existing customers would not face an immediate change, although renewal migrations could involve increases of about 5% or less.
Management deliberately accepted lower initial economics. On 8 May 2024, CEO Yamini Rangan told investors that the model was expected to bring “lower initial ASP, higher volume of customers and higher rates of upgrades over time.” Adoption moved faster than expected, pushing average selling prices down before customer volume caught up and creating a temporary headwind.
That is an unusually useful pricing lesson. A well-designed reset can make reported metrics worse before it makes the customer base stronger.
CFO Kathryn Bueker noted in the same call that multi-Hub adoption among Professional and Enterprise customers was helping offset large cohorts of lower-ASP Starter customers. In other words, inexpensive entry and richer expansion were designed to coexist.
HubSpot has continued to demonstrate that expansion logic. In the second quarter of 2026, 64% of new Professional-and-above customers landed with multiple Hubs; HubSpot ended June with 306,446 customers and average subscription revenue per customer of $11,800. Quarterly revenue reached $911.7 million, up 20% year over year on a reported basis.
Where Atlassian made the seat an efficient distribution tool, HubSpot showed how packaging can keep the commercial relationship growing even when headcount is not the only source of value.
The five-step sequence shows why one model stayed cleaner
Monetizely's 5-Step Pricing Framework treats pricing as a connected sequence rather than a rate-card exercise. Goals and Segmentation establishes which customers the company intends to serve and what pricing must achieve. Packaging determines what those customers can buy. Pricing Metric decides which unit makes the bill move. Rate Setting establishes the amount charged and how it changes across tiers or volumes. Operationalization makes the design work in quoting, billing, product entitlements, reporting and renewal. The sequence matters because a company cannot compensate for confused packaging with a clever meter, or compensate for a poor meter with a lower rate. The broader logic is also developed in Monetizing Agentic AI.
Applying those steps reveals why Atlassian's historic architecture remains the cleaner of the two, even though HubSpot has built more ways to monetise expansion.
| Framework step | Atlassian | HubSpot | Grade and rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Packaging | Free → Standard → Premium → Enterprise, now supplemented by Collections. | Free → Starter → Professional → Enterprise across multiple Hubs, plus broader platform offers. | Atlassian A- / HubSpot A-. Both create obvious entry and expansion paths; both now face portfolio complexity. |
| Pricing Metric | Per user remains the main Jira meter, with progressive pricing and emerging consumption elements. | Core Seats coexist with marketing contacts, product tiers, credits and selected AI outcome charges. | Atlassian A- / HubSpot B. Atlassian preserves a clearer anchor; HubSpot captures more value sources at the cost of bill simplicity. |
| Operationalization | Self-service purchase, transparent prices, free trial and automated expansion have been part of the model since before the IPO. | Free access and online purchase work well, but the 2024 seat migration temporarily reduced ASP faster than volume recovered, while 2026 AI changes again created near-term pressure. | Atlassian A / HubSpot B+. HubSpot is willing to reset pricing, but each added meter raises execution risk. |
The distinction is not that Atlassian understands pricing and HubSpot does not. HubSpot's tougher problem is that Marketing Hub alone currently combines an edition price, included Core Seats, a marketing-contact allowance and HubSpot Credits, while other Hubs rely much more heavily on seats.
As of 13 August 2026, Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800 per month on an annual commitment, includes three Core Seats, 2,000 marketing contacts and 3,000 HubSpot Credits; Enterprise starts at $3,600 per month with five Core Seats, 10,000 contacts and 5,000 credits. Additional credits can be purchased at $0.010 each, according to HubSpot's public pricing page.
Each element has a defensible reason to exist. Together, however, they make the customer's next dollar harder to predict than another Jira seat.
AI is exposing the limit of both companies' original SaaS meters
The pressure is no longer theoretical. Both firms are now pricing software that can perform work rather than merely help a person perform it.
The Agentic Monetization Spectrum, or AMS, helps frame that change through three dimensions. Zero-human ability asks how much work the agent can complete without a person doing or reviewing it. Operational domain asks whether it handles one task, a full workflow, or work across several functions. Output/cost ratio asks how rapidly customer value rises compared with the compute cost required to produce it. As autonomy, scope and value relative to cost increase, a pure seat becomes less capable of tracking what the customer receives; output, usage or outcome pricing becomes more credible.
Published product evidence puts HubSpot and Atlassian in the middle of that shift rather than at its extreme.
| AI offer | Zero-human ability | Operational domain | Output/cost ratio | Pricing implication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot agents | Medium | Medium | Inflecting | Seats alone leave value uncaptured. Outcome or activity charges can work for bounded agent jobs, but they should remain secondary to a clear platform package. |
| Atlassian Rovo | Medium | Medium-to-large | Inflecting | User and Collection pricing should remain primary while AI consumption captures unusually heavy automated use. |
HubSpot offers the clearer test. On 5 August 2026, Rangan said customers were asking for proof of value and predictable AI cost, leading HubSpot to lower prices for several agents, add spend controls and introduce outcome-based pricing for selected agents. The company also disclosed that Customer Agent was resolving 72% of support tickets without human escalation across its measured activity.
The change did not come without cost. Bueker told investors the April 2026 product, pricing and go-to-market changes were a headwind during the quarter, while management reported that lower agent prices and trials had created near-term pressure on credit expansion.
Atlassian is taking a different route. Its fiscal 2025 shareholder communication said it had added consumption-based pricing in several areas, including Rovo, while Premium and Enterprise remained important monetisation paths. By April 2026, Atlassian said Rovo customers were growing ARR at twice the rate of non-Rovo customers and that Teamwork Collection was its primary AI monetisation motion.
Mike Cannon-Brookes captured the expansion logic neatly in April 2026: customers were “voting with their wallets” by expanding seats and adopting additional offerings. James Chuong, then Atlassian's finance chief, likewise reported in the company's April 2026 results that Cloud revenue growth had accelerated to 29% as customers deepened engagement.
Atlassian's May 2026 Flex announcement pushes the experiment further. The planned enterprise model uses a fixed spending commitment that can be deployed more flexibly across Atlassian's portfolio, reducing the need for large customers to forecast individual product use far in advance.
Our view is that Atlassian has chosen the stronger transition. Rather than replacing its familiar meter everywhere, it is putting new monetisation above it through Collections, consumption and enterprise flexibility.
Their biggest innovation was making the price architecture match the buying motion
The influence of these companies becomes clearer when compared with other major SaaS vendors.
As of 13 August 2026, Salesforce's Sales Cloud Enterprise remains $175 per user per month when billed annually. Slack's Pro plan is $7.25 per active user per month annually and Business+ is $15; Slack also credits customers when prepaid members become inactive, defining activity over a 28-day period.
Neither model is identical to Atlassian's or HubSpot's. The family resemblance lies in the mechanics.
| SaaS example | Entry mechanism | Main expansion path | Pricing lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atlassian Jira, 2026 | Free for up to 10 users | More users, higher editions, Collections | A public seat price can double as the acquisition mechanism. |
| HubSpot, 2026 | Free tools and low-priced Starter | Higher editions, more Hubs, contacts, seats and AI usage | Packaging can monetise customer growth across several functions. |
| Slack, 2026 | Free plan | Active users and richer editions | A familiar seat metric becomes more acceptable when inactive users are not permanently charged. |
| Salesforce Sales Cloud, 2026 | Trial and edition ladder | More paid users and higher editions | Per-user pricing remains durable when users directly operate the core workflow. |
The game change, therefore, was not the invention of freemium, tiers or seats. Those mechanisms predate both companies. Their contribution was proving at very large scale that the price page, product experience and expansion strategy could operate as one system.
Atlassian's fiscal 2025 numbers make that point especially strongly. Subscription revenue reached $4.93 billion for the year, up 26%, and management attributed the increase primarily to seat expansion among existing customers and price increases. The company ended the year with 51,978 customers generating more than $10,000 in Cloud ARR.
HubSpot's evidence is different but equally instructive. Its 2025 10-K reported $3.1 billion of revenue, 98% of it subscription revenue, and 288,706 customers at year-end; its freemium model remained an explicit part of the way the company acquired customers. By June 2026, customer count had crossed 306,000.
Scale did not come from maximising the first invoice. Both businesses repeatedly accepted low-friction entry because they expected later expansion to do more economic work.
Complexity is now threatening the advantage that created the growth
A pricing system can accumulate logic one sensible decision at a time.
HubSpot needed contacts because a marketing database with two marketers and two million marketable contacts creates far more value than one with the same two marketers and 2,000 contacts. It needed seats because sales and service products are used by people. AI created credits because automated work carries variable cost, and outcome charges now seek a tighter link to delivered results. Every individual choice can be defended.
Atlassian faces the same drift from the opposite starting point. Seats worked when Jira and Confluence were principally tools used by people. Premium, Enterprise, Collections, Rovo consumption and Flex now ask buyers to understand several ways in which the same platform can expand.
The failures here are not failed companies; they are visible moments when the pricing mechanism imposed friction.
| Brand and date | What strained | What SaaS leaders should notice |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot, March-May 2024 | Faster-than-expected adoption of the new seat model reduced ASP before additional customer volume fully offset the decline. | A strategically sound pricing reset can still fail operationally if migration speed and revenue timing are misjudged. |
| HubSpot, April-August 2026 | Lower AI prices, trials and new outcome pricing improved entry but created near-term pressure on credit expansion and contributed to commercial headwinds. | Changing metric, rate and buying motion together makes causality harder to read. |
| Atlassian, 2019-2021 | Free Cloud editions increased top-of-funnel volume but customers took longer to convert than users entering through the historic Starter licence funnel. | Free entry changes conversion timing, so management must judge cohorts over their full expansion life rather than first-year revenue. |
The third case is especially important. In its fiscal 2021 shareholder filing, Atlassian said free editions had materially increased top-of-funnel volume but that free users took longer to grow and convert than customers from its previous Starter licence funnel. The company expected a near-term headwind while that conversion engine matured.
HubSpot experienced almost the same economic pattern four years later with its seat reset: lower friction first, weaker initial economics second, expansion expected later. Rangan nevertheless said in May 2024 that management had “high conviction” the seat change would let customers start and scale more easily.
Pricing leaders should study these episodes because they separate strategy from accounting timing. A lower entry price is not a failure merely because ASP falls. It becomes a failure when the lower entry price does not improve conversion, retention, product adoption or later expansion enough to recover the value given away.
The next reset should restore one obvious meter beneath richer packages
Monetizely's position is not that either company should return to a 2015 price list. Their products have changed too much.
The stronger next architecture is one obvious primary meter for each workflow family, with packaging doing most of the work of value capture. Secondary usage or outcome charges should appear only when customer value and vendor cost genuinely change in ways the primary meter cannot capture.
For Atlassian, the implication is concrete. Seats should remain the main measure for products centred on human teamwork; Collections should carry broader platform value; consumption should apply to unusually heavy automated activity. Flex can help large enterprises allocate spend, but it should not make the customer reverse-engineer several hidden meters to understand the invoice.
HubSpot needs a harder simplification. Core Seats can govern human access across the platform, marketing contacts can remain the scaling unit where audience size truly changes Marketing Hub value, and AI outcomes or credits can price automated work. What should disappear over time is unnecessary overlap - cases where the buyer must simultaneously forecast seats, Hub editions, contacts, credits, add-ons and several separate agent charges to understand what next year's bill could become.
That recommendation preserves what made both companies important in the first place: expansion without purchase friction.
SaaS operators looking to follow their example should make four decisions.
Decide whether pricing is supposed to reduce sales effort or maximise negotiated yield. Atlassian's model worked because transparent pricing and self-service distribution reinforced each other. Copying the price page while keeping a sales-heavy buying process captures little of the advantage.
Measure the economics of customer cohorts, not only the first contract. Both Atlassian's free Cloud move and HubSpot's 2024 seat change weakened near-term measures while aiming for greater downstream expansion. A pricing reset should be judged on conversion, retention and expansion over enough time for that mechanism to work.
Make the primary meter survive product expansion. Before introducing credits, outcomes or another usage unit, ask whether the existing meter still represents the main way customers grow. Atlassian's seat has survived remarkably well because collaboration still expands with users; a new metric should clear a high bar before displacing such an anchor.
Treat billing simplicity as product quality. A buyer should be able to explain what makes next year's bill rise without opening a spreadsheet. As products add AI and automation, the companies that preserve that clarity will inherit the original Atlassian and HubSpot advantage.
Assumptions
The grades and AMS placements are Monetizely's analytical judgements based on the cited public evidence rather than vendor-issued scores. “Medium” and “medium-to-large” AMS ratings describe the current product archetypes, not every individual agent or workflow. Current public prices are stated as observed on 13 August 2026; promotional rates, currencies, negotiated enterprise terms and taxes can differ.
Footnotes
Monetizing Agentic AI, Amazon, 2026. https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Agentic-AI-Handbook-Transformation/dp/B0H7Z13VKJ/
Atlassian, Form F-1 Registration Statement, 2015. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000104746915008450/a2226437zf-1.htm
Atlassian, Form 20-F for fiscal 2018. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037218000038/a20-f06302018.htm
HubSpot, Form 10-K for 2020. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1404655/000156459021006083/hubs-10k_20201231.htm
Atlassian, Q1 FY2021 Shareholder Letter filed with the SEC, 2020. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037220000037/teamq12021shareholderlet.htm
Atlassian, quarterly filing describing Free Cloud and Cloud Premium, May 2020. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037220000012/a6-kquarterlyreportq3f.htm
Atlassian, Jira pricing and Cloud licensing, accessed 13 August 2026. https://www.atlassian.com/en/software/jira/pricing https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/cloud
HubSpot, “Upcoming changes to HubSpot's pricing,” 30 January 2024. https://ir.hubspot.com/news-releases/news-release-details/upcoming-changes-hubspots-pricing
Atlassian, Q3 FY2026 Shareholder Letter, 30 April 2026. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/company-news/shareholder-letter-q3fy26
Atlassian, “Introducing Flex: A Flexible Commercial Model for the AI Era,” 6 May 2026. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/company-news/flex-team-26
HubSpot, Marketing Hub pricing, accessed 13 August 2026. https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/marketing
HubSpot, Q2 2026 earnings release and earnings-call transcript, 5 August 2026. https://ir.hubspot.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hubspot-reports-q2-2026-results https://ir.hubspot.com/financials/quarterly-results
Slack, pricing, accessed 13 August 2026. https://slack.com/pricing https://slack.com/pricing/pro
Salesforce, Sales Cloud pricing, accessed 13 August 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/in/small-business/pricing/
HubSpot, Q1 2024 earnings-call transcript, 8 May 2024. https://ir.hubspot.com/financials/quarterly-results
HubSpot, Form 10-K for 2025, filed 11 February 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1404655/000119312526046646/hubs-20251231.htm
Atlassian, Form 10-K for fiscal 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037225000036/team-20250630.htm
Atlassian, Form 20-F for fiscal 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000165037219000020/a20-f06302019.htm