
Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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SaaS Pricing
The business world is experiencing a rapid shift toward subscription-based models, far beyond just software. From consulting agencies to digital content creators, services of all kinds are adopting recurring revenue models. The reasons are clear: businesses enjoy more predictable revenue streams and deeper customer relationships than one-off sales. In fact, companies built on recurring revenue have grown 4-5x faster than the S&P 500 in recent years.
For service providers, moving to a subscription model offers increased stability, improved customer retention, and greater growth potential. As the global subscription economy is set to reach $1.5 trillion by 2025, this approach is becoming essential for businesses seeking long-term success.
This surge in subscription-based pricing is accelerating across industries. For service providers, moving to a subscription pricing model can unlock substantial benefits. Recurring revenue smooths out the volatility of project-based income and boosts company valuations. It also incentivizes stronger customer loyalty and retention, since clients engage continuously rather than through one-off transactions. Top service companies now leverage recurring revenue to expand customer contracts and increase Annual Contract Value (ACV) over time, with some firms reporting net retention rates above 120%.
Even traditionally one-time services are making the leap.
We’ve even seen experimenting with subscriptions, such as pay-per-feature upgrades in cars, to generate ongoing revenue. Across industries, “as-a-Service” is the new norm, and service providers who convert to subscription pricing stand to reap major rewards in stability and scale.
So, how can you transform your own service pricing into a successful subscription model? It’s not as simple as charging a monthly fee. It requires a strategic rethinking of how you package and monetize your offerings. Fortunately, a proven roadmap exists. In the book Price to Scale, Ajit Ghuman and Jan Pasternak outline a comprehensive 5-step pricing transformation framework. This framework, grounded in real-world SaaS and service pricing projects, can guide any service business through the transition. By following these five steps, you can convert your service pricing to subscriptions in a way that is sustainable, customer-centric, and growth-oriented.
Before diving into the steps, we’ll briefly cover the importance of aligning your pricing strategy with your business goals. Then we’ll walk through each step in detail, so that by the end, you’ll have a clear plan for turning your service into a thriving subscription-based business.
The transition to subscription pricing must begin with clear alignment on your business goals. What are you trying to achieve? Whether it’s boosting profit margins, capturing market share, or accelerating customer adoption, your pricing strategy should support these top priorities.
Start by aligning your leadership team on these goals. Without consensus on pricing direction, you risk designing a subscription offering that pleases no one. Many pricing failures stem from misalignment among product, sales, and finance teams. For example, if the sales team targets a different customer profile than the product team envisioned, even the best pricing model will fall flat due to mismatched expectations.
Clarify your strategic intent. Are you aiming for rapid user growth, lower initial ACV? Or do you want to focus on profitability and improving unit economics? Perhaps you're moving upmarket to enterprise clients, or expanding into the SMB segment. These decisions will inform how you design your subscription pricing. Write down a concise set of pricing goals – e.g. “Increase customer lifetime value and ARR,” or “Expand our mid-market customer base,” or “Simplify our pricing to reduce sales cycle length.” This will serve as your north star throughout the transformation.
Additionally, confirm who your target customers (segments) are as part of goal alignment. Often, revisiting pricing forces companies to update their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) definitions. Ensure you have a clear picture of the customer segments you plan to serve with your new subscription offerings. We’ll dive deeper into segmentation next, but at the goal alignment stage, it’s crucial to agree on which customer groups and use cases you’re focusing on. Pricing a high-touch enterprise subscription will look very different from a self-service small business offering – so you need consensus on your focus areas.
In short, get everyone in agreement on the “why” and “who” before the “how.” Align the pricing project to your business’s overarching goals and target segments. This upfront alignment will save you from downstream headaches and set a strong foundation for the five steps to follow. With your objectives and audience defined, you’re ready to start executing the framework for subscription pricing success.
(Optional business goal alignment checkpoint: Ensure you have executive buy-in on the shift to subscription pricing, with clear success metrics. Common metrics to track might include Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) growth, gross margins, customer retention rate, and average contract value. Align these metrics with your business goals so you can measure the impact of each step.)
The first step in the framework is Customer Segmentation. You need to identify and segment the distinct groups of customers you serve (or plan to serve) as you roll out subscription pricing. All customers are not equal; different segments have different needs, behaviors, and willingness to pay. Segmentation ensures your new pricing is not a one-size-fits-all scheme, but rather tailored to the specific value perceptions of each group.
Start by analyzing your current customer base and prospects. Look for meaningful ways to group customers, such as:
Often, it’s helpful to define 2–3 primary segments to focus on initially. You might create an Ideal Customer Profile for each, summarizing their characteristics and needs. For example, a marketing agency shifting to a subscription model might segment clients into “Startups”, “Mid-market Growth Companies”, and “Enterprise Brands.” The startup segment might need a low-cost, standardized package, whereas enterprises need advanced service and are willing to pay a premium for it.
Actionable Tips: How to Segment Your Customers:
With your customer segments clearly defined, the next step is positioning and packaging your offerings in a way that suits a subscription model. Moving from a traditional service model (e.g., one-time projects, hourly billing) to a subscription model requires a shift in how you deliver value to customers over time. Your packaging should reflect a service that customers continuously engage with, not just a one-off transaction.
Start by thinking about how your service can be delivered regularly or continuously, and then structure your packages accordingly. Rather than using the generic "Good-Better-Best" tiers, tailor your offering based on customer needs and the recurring value they will receive. For example:
Make sure each tier reflects an increased level of service. Equally important, avoid “shelfware” in your packages. Shelfware is what happens when customers pay for features they don’t actually use, often a result of throwing every possible feature into the highest tier without considering if the segment needs them. To prevent this, sanity-check each package: Is your target segment likely to fully use and appreciate these features? For instance, if your mid-tier customers never use advanced analytics, don’t include that feature only in the top tier; it might indicate a packaging misalignment. Every package should feel tailored: the segment it’s meant for should naturally gravitate to it and find it neither lacking nor overly bloated. If you discover a package that rarely gets chosen, or features in a package that consistently go unused, adjust your packaging. The goal is to have each customer segment “auto-select” the tier that fits them best.
Positioning goes hand in hand with packaging. This means framing the value proposition of each tier in terms that appeal to its segment. For a consulting service, you might position the Basic plan as “accessible startup support” whereas the Enterprise plan is “strategic advisory for large-scale growth” – same core service, but messaged differently. Ensure your marketing and sales materials clearly communicate the outcomes and benefits each segment gets with the corresponding package.
A great real-world illustration is Design Pickle, a creative services company that initially operated much like a typical design agency, charging per project or by the hour for graphics work. Founder Russ Perry realized the friction and unpredictability of one-off billing, so in 2015 he pivoted to a flat-rate subscription model that gave clients “unlimited” monthly design services for a fixed fee. Over time, Design Pickle introduced multiple subscription tiers to meet the needs of different customer segments:
This approach replaced irregular, project-based income with predictable monthly revenue, stabilized workflows, and deepened client engagement. Businesses subscribing to Design Pickle could now count on steady, ongoing creative support, while Design Pickle itself scaled rapidly due to that recurring revenue stream. Their success proves that well-defined subscription tiers can be a game-changer for service-based businesses too.
Actionable Tips – How to Design and Position Your Subscription Packages:
With your packages defined, the next step is to choose your pricing metric, which determines what customers will pay on a recurring basis. This should align with both how customers derive value from your service and how you incur costs.
Common pricing metrics include:
For example:
To determine the best metric for your service, consider the following:
Importantly, your pricing metric should align with your segments and packages, but be decided after packaging. The book emphasizes not to intertwine metric and packaging too early: some companies mistakenly differentiate packages only by quantity (e.g. Basic = 5 users, Pro = 50 users, etc.), which signals that the only difference is volume, not feature value . It’s often better to first define packages by feature scope (as we did in Step 2) and then layer the metric on. You can certainly include usage limits per tier (for example, different tiers include different amounts of a resource), but treat the metric choice as a strategic decision in itself.
Many service businesses are adopting usage-based pricing (UBP), where customers pay according to how much they consume (sometimes with a base fee plus additional usage charges).
This can work well when usage varies significantly among customers. For instance, a software company might charge a base fee for platform access and additional fees for extra consumption (like additional data or features used). However, usage-based pricing can be unpredictable, and some customers prefer more predictability in their bills. A solution to this is tiered usage, where each tier includes a certain level of usage, and overage charges apply once the customer exceeds that limit. This approach balances flexibility with the predictability that customers appreciate in subscription models.
Now comes the step many think of as “pricing” proper: Rate Setting - deciding how much to charge for your subscription packages (and the metric units, if applicable). This is where you translate all the prior strategic work (segments, packages, metric) into concrete numbers on a page. Finding the right price points is a blend of art and science. It should reflect your value, market dynamics, and business goals.
Here’s how to tackle rate setting in a structured way:
Once you've set your rates, communicate them clearly to your customers. Transparency builds trust and avoids confusion. Now, with the pricing model fully designed (segments → packages → metric → price points), the work is not over, you must operationalize it effectively.
Designing a brilliant subscription pricing model is only half the battle. The final step is Operationalization: integrating this new pricing into your business’s day-to-day operations and ensuring it actually delivers results.
When moving to a subscription pricing model for a service, here are the key operational areas to address:
By executing on these operational steps, you’ll bring your subscription pricing model to life. Your service business will have transitioned from ad-hoc or one-time pricing to a well-oiled subscription revenue machine. The result should be smoother processes internally and a better experience for customers, who will now consistently receive value on a recurring basis.
Converting your service’s pricing into a subscription model is a significant endeavor, but by following the 5-step framework – from segmentation through operationalization – you can do it with confidence and precision. We began with the big-picture rationale: subscriptions offer predictable, scalable revenue and stronger customer lifetime value. If you need any help achieving those benefits consider taking help of our SaaS pricing experts. We at Monetizely, have an overall 28+ years of collective experience working with the best legacy companies like Twilio, Medallia, Narvar, LinkedIn, etc. Our experts can get your free pricing assessment done and help you scale your business to new heights. So, hurry up, your service-as-a-subscription awaits!
Join companies like Zoom, DocuSign, and Twilio using our systematic pricing approach to increase revenue by 12-40% year-over-year.