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Estd 4.22.2023
Is your SaaS product leaving money on the table? In B2B markets, buyers often have a high willingness to pay (WTP) for solutions that deliver clear business outcomes and ROI. Yet many SaaS companies struggle to capture that value. The result is a pricing paradox: your market would gladly pay a premium to solve a critical problem, just not for the way your product is currently packaged or priced. In today’s climate of efficient growth, this mismatch can be fatal. Investors and CEOs alike are refocusing on profitable growth, growing revenue and margin simultaneously, making pricing a top strategic level.
This blog dives into why high WTP often goes uncaptured, how common pricing research habits lead you astray, and what to do instead. Let’s ensure your pricing reflects the true value you deliver.
B2B Buyers Will Pay for Value (So Why Aren’t You Charging for It?)
B2B buyers are fundamentally willing to pay commensurate with the value and ROI your product provides. If your SaaS saves a company $500K in costs or drives an extra $5M in revenue, you can bet they’d budget significant dollars for it. In fact, pricing experts often suggest software vendors can capture about 10-20% of the economic value they create. For example, a solution that delivers $1M in annual benefit might reasonably charge $100K–$200K per year. Buyers consider that a fair trade-off for a strong ROI.
So why do companies routinely undercharge? One telltale sign is when customers say things like,
- “I’m surprised you can even make money at your prices”. Perhaps they compare your tool to another in their stack that they pay 2x, 5x, even 10x more for (yet they prefer yours).
- Or they describe your fee as a “drop in the bucket” relative to the value received. If customers aren’t balking at your price at all, it’s a red flag that your product is likely undervalued. Companies consistently happy with your low price would “not balk at paying more”. In other words, the market is willing to pay more, you’re just not asking for it.
Let’s talk about a real example: StatusPage (status page SaaS) initially charged $49/month for its paid tier. Over time, they eliminated a free plan and increased prices by up to 8x with minimal impact on conversion or churn. In doing so, they grew average revenue per user 2.4x and quickly ramped ARR into the millions. Clearly, customers had a much higher WTP for StatusPage’s solution than the company’s original pricing captured.
Similarly, BigPanda (an IT operations platform) realized through customer conversations that they delivered huge value and weren’t charging in line with it. By realigning price with value (and being transparent about it), they achieved a “fair value exchange” and unlocked revenue growth.
Steven Sinofsky put it bluntly: “I’ve seen founders say their product saves hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet price it like it saves thousands.”
This disconnect signals more than lost revenue, it signals weak differentiation. Pricing is a signal. If your pricing doesn’t reflect the size of the problem you solve:
- Customers may doubt your product’s robustness
- They might lump you in with commodity tools
- Your price could unintentionally undermine your positioning
Since 2023, this mindset has shifted: If you see the image below, you will see that in the first three quarters of 2024, 42% of companies adjusted their pricing, with increases far outpacing cuts, the average increase was 20%.
And in a 2023 McKinsey survey, roughly half of software companies planned to raise prices or curb discounts in the near term (only 6% were keeping status quo). The message is clear: capturing your true value is now a strategic imperative, not an optional exercise. If you’re solving a mission-critical problem, don’t be the vendor charging “only thousands” for a “hundreds of thousands” problemtechcrunch.com. Your market has the budget and willingness to pay for meaningful outcomes, make sure your pricing strategy claims your fair share of that value.
The Flaw in Feature-Level Pricing Tests (and How They Mislead You)
Many SaaS companies fail to capture high willingness to pay (WTP) because they approach pricing research at the feature level. It’s a common practice: survey customers about individual features, run conjoint analyses, or A/B test small tweaks to packaging. The intent is good, data-driven pricing, but these methods often backfire due to a lack of context.
1. Context Is Missing in Feature-Only Surveys
In complex B2B scenarios, features alone mean little without understanding the customer’s problem space. Traditional survey-based methods like feature ranking or conjoint present respondents with a list of features or attributes and ask them to indicate preferences or what they’d pay. But if the respondent doesn’t fully grasp what a feature does, why it matters, or how it fits their workflow, the data will be garbage.
As we point this out in our blog, simply showing a feature name (e.g. “AI-Driven Sentiment Analysis”) to someone who isn’t deeply familiar with your domain yields “highly unreliable data”. Without proper context or explanation, prospective buyers can’t accurately assess a feature’s value or make informed trade-offs.
2. Value Is Relative, and Contextual
Feature-level research also ignores that value is relative to the buyer’s environment. A capability that one customer finds mission-critical might be irrelevant to another, depending on their industry, company size, or processes. If your pricing tests don’t capture these nuances, you’ll get a distorted picture of willingness to pay.
For instance, say you survey customers and find that “Role-Based Dashboards” don’t rank highly among requested features. Taken at face value, you might decide not to include it in higher-tier packages. But perhaps the reason it ranked low is that respondents didn’t realize those dashboards could save each team lead 5 hours a week, a huge ROI in productivity that wasn’t communicated. Without anchoring to the customer’s pain points and workflow, feature importance rankings are superficial.
3. You’re Often Asking the Wrong Person
Another blind spot is the complexity of B2B buying and usage. In enterprise SaaS, the end user of a feature is often not the economic buyer. Imagine testing pricing with just power users of your software, they might fixate on usability and specific tools. But the true buyer (e.g. a CFO or CIO) cares about higher-level outcomes like cost savings, risk reduction, or revenue lift. If you fail to engage the real buyer persona in pricing research, you’ll mis-estimate WTP.
Likewise, enterprise purchases involve multiple stakeholders and approval steps. A survey can’t easily capture dynamics like who holds the budget, how internal ROI justification happens, or what a drawn-out procurement process values. It’s not just about which features are liked – it’s about why those features matter (or don’t) in the context of the buyer’s larger business goals.
4. You Risk Optimizing for the Wrong Signals
The fallout from feature-focused pricing tests is misleading willingness-to-pay data and misguided packaging. Companies end up optimizing for the wrong things. They might over-invest in flashy features that survey respondents mentioned, while under-emphasizing the core capabilities that actually drive ROI (and for which buyers would pay a premium). They might set price points that seem “just right” in a survey spreadsheet, only to find in real sales conversations that buyers were actually willing to pay much more – if the solution genuinely solves their critical pain. In short, you risk measuring WTP in a vacuum and underestimating it in reality.
Example: You test $50/user pricing, hear pushback, and assume that’s the ceiling. Meanwhile, the competitor framed their product as a “revenue acceleration platform” and charged $1000/month for the whole package, and the same customer paid it, because they saw the ROI. Focusing too narrowly on features leads to missed revenue opportunities: you leave value on the table that competitors or substitutes will capture by addressing the problem more holistically.
5. Misreading Segments Leads to Lost Revenue
Regarding Docker’s 2023 pricing changes, many SaaS firms “underutilize price increases,” as you can see in the image below.
In Docker’s case, they hiked prices 67-80% on some plans, but left their highest-tier Business plan unchanged – a missed opportunity, since those enterprise customers were the least price-sensitive. This kind of misstep often stems from caution and incomplete data, fearing to adjust certain packages due to feedback from a subset of users, while the segment with the highest WTP (enterprise) goes untapped.
The takeaway: Pricing and packaging must start with a deep understanding of the buyer’s world, not just a feature checklist. If your pricing research isn’t revealing why customers value your product and how they perceive its impact, you’re likely aiming at the wrong target. In the next section, we’ll explore how to flip this approach, to price around outcomes and value, not feature tit-for-tat.
Price Around the Problem: Aligning with Outcomes and ROI
To truly capture high willingness to pay, shift your perspective from features to outcomes. The most successful SaaS pricing strategies anchor on the problem being solved and the tangible ROI for the customer. This is the essence of value-based pricing, aligning price with the unique value your product delivers, rather than with your costs or the number of features. Varun Dixit, emphasizes that pricing should be a core part of your growth strategy, not an afterthought, according to his read on Price to Scale. By making pricing value-centric, you ensure it reflects the true worth of your solution in the customer’s eyes.
1. Segment Customers and Match Value to Willingness to Pay
In practice, value-based pricing often means segmenting your market and tailoring packages to different WTP levels. One size rarely fits all. Enterprise buyers with a dire, expensive problem will pay orders of magnitude more than a small startup with a nice-to-have need, and your pricing should accommodate that.
According to Ajit Ghuman, author of Price to Scale, smart market segmentation in pricing: different tiers or bundles for different customer profiles based on their needs and willingness to pay. This could involve a “good-better-best” tiered model, usage-based pricing, or hybrid approaches, as long as each segment is charged in line with the value they get.
For example, many SaaS companies offer an entry-level package for smaller customers, but have premium packages (or add-ons) that address the complex needs of larger enterprises at a much higher price. This way, you capture revenue from those who truly value (and use) the most capabilities without alienating the lower end of the market.
2. Choose the Right Value Metric
A critical concept here is the value metric, the unit by which your pricing scales that correlates with customer value. It could be the number of users, amount of data processed, outreach emails sent, etc., as long as it tracks with the outcome the customer cares about.
Your value metric is the single most important decision of your pricing model.
- Get it right → Customers feel they’re paying more only when they’re getting more.
- Get it wrong → You either leave money on the table or charge for things that don’t feel valuable.
An outcome-aligned metric makes pricing easy to understand and predict, and links price to customer success. For instance, if your product’s value is in automating transactions, pricing per 1,000 transactions processed ties cost directly to outcome. If it saves hours of work, perhaps pricing per user or per workflow is sensible. The key is to charge for the “unit of value” that scales with the customer’s benefit. This ensures that as the customer gains more benefit (and can justify more spend), your revenue grows alongside their willingness to pay.
Recent SaaS behavior reflects a clear trend: the rise of usage-based pricing (UBP).
- By 2023, 38% of SaaS companies used UBP instead of flat seat-based models.
- Why it works:
- Customers pay for what they use (and presumably value)
- High-usage = high revenue
- Low-usage = low barrier to entry
OpenView's research on UBP shows that it can drive faster revenue growth when executed well, precisely because it monetizes the top end of usage without needing to hard-sell a larger contract, the customers expand themselves by using more, and thus paying more.
Even traditional tiered pricing can be tweaked to be more value-aligned.
Case in point:
A multibillion-dollar SaaS company (anonymized as “Company D” by Bessemer Venture Partners) found that their old tiers weren’t monetizing new features they rolled out. They had evolved into a broader platform, delivering more value, but their pricing model hadn’t kept up, many powerful new features were just getting tossed into existing tiers for free. After a strategic overhaul, they moved to a hybrid model: still offering core tiers but with certain high-value features turned into add-ons that cost extra. This way, customers who needed those extras (often larger, more advanced customers) would pay more, while others weren’t forced to. The result? It “captures more value” from those heavy-use customers and led to a meaningful spike in net retention (i.e. existing customers spending more). In essence, Company D started charging appropriately for the additional outcomes it was enabling, and it paid off in revenue per customer.
3. Anchor on ROI, Not Feature Lists
If you want pricing that feels justified, start with the problem and its economic impact.
Ask:
- What problem do we solve?
- How much is that problem costing our customer?
If your product prevents $1M in annual fraud losses, a $100K/year enterprise price tag is not outrageous, it’s a bargain. If your solution drives a 10% efficiency gain in a process worth $10M to the client, charging somewhere in the single-digit millions (or a percentage of savings) could be justified. Of course, you’ll need to validate these numbers with market feedback, but frame the conversation around ROI and outcomes, not feature checklists. This approach not only lets you charge more; it also resonates better with customers. They want to pay for results, it’s much easier to get budget approval for software that demonstrably increases revenue or cuts costs, compared to a nice-to-have tool. Communicate in those terms, and your pricing becomes a logical extension of your product’s value story.
4. Communicate Value Boldly and Psychologically
Lastly, don’t forget the psychological side of pricing. Buyers’ perception of value matters. Ghuman introduces concepts like “cognitive pricing,” how packaging and price presentation influence the perceived value.. Ensure your tiers and pricing communicate the high-value nature of your offering.
For example, anchoring with a high-end enterprise plan can make your mid-tier (still high-value) option seem more reasonable by comparison. If you truly have a product that saves hundreds of thousands of dollars, don’t be shy about having a premium enterprise tier that signals “this is a mission-critical, ROI-driving platform.”
Jason Lemkin of SaaStr often advises startups: charge more than you think you should, most are “undercharging, I guarantee it”, he says, noting that many founders err on the side of caution instead of pricing boldly according to value. While you don’t want to overshoot and scare away customers, the point is that erring too low is a more common problem. Be confident in the ROI you deliver and charge for it. Your customers (the right ones) will pay if you’ve built something that truly moves the needle for them.
Monetizely’s In-Person Research: A Better Way to Uncover True WTP
Knowing that you need to focus on customer value and outcomes is one thing; figuring out how much each segment will truly pay and how to package your product optimally is another. This is where Monetizely’s in-person, interview-driven research methodology comes in, and it’s a game changer for B2B SaaS pricing. Monetizely developed this approach after seeing firsthand how traditional pricing surveys and feature-based research were leading companies astray, especially in enterprise SaaS.
In fact, we’ve worked with multiple SaaS vendors who spent $100k+ on big-name pricing studies (think conjoint analysis and the like) only to end up more confused than before. The old methods gave them piles of data but no clear, actionable pricing strategy. Monetizely’s solution: throw out the blind surveys and sit down with customers for in-depth conversations about value.
Our methodology is an integrated, qualitative-quantitative approach conducted through live interviews (often via video or in person). Instead of sending a survey that respondents may not fully understand, we guide them through an interactive session. Here’s how it works:
1. Context-Driven Discovery
We begin by talking about the customer’s broader pain points and goals, before ever mentioning pricing. What problems are they trying to solve? What obstacles or inefficiencies cost them time or money? This grounds the discussion in real business needs and forces prioritization of what matters most. By the time we discuss features, both parties understand why those features matter (or don’t) to the business.
2. Iterative Package Exploration
Rather than ask “How much would you pay for Feature X?”, we present the customer with realistic product packages or tiers, e.g. a Basic vs. Pro vs. Enterprise edition, each with a set of capabilities. We have them choose which package best fits their needs and why. Only then do we reveal the proposed price for that package and gauge their reaction. This mimics an actual buying decision: the customer sees a value proposition and a price, and we observe how that affects their choice. We often iterate, adjusting the package or price and seeing if their preference changes. This yields rich insight into price sensitivity in context, e.g. a feature set might be appealing at $50K/year but not at $100K, or vice versa if more value is included.
3. Pricing Sensitivity Questions (Van Westendorp Method, with a Twist)
We incorporate structured questions from the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, asking at what price the offering would feel too expensive to consider, at what point it’d be getting expensive, too cheap (so as to doubt quality), etc.. However, we don’t stop at the number; we ask “why” for each threshold. This qualitative layer is crucial.
For example, a respondent might say “$100,000/year would be too expensive for us,” but explaining why could reveal they have a budget cap in that department, or they’d need CFO approval above $100K. That context tells you how to price or package, maybe $90K flies under approval thresholds, or maybe you need to sell into a different budget line. Conversely, they might say “$30K feels too cheap” because they associate a higher price with a comprehensive, enterprise-grade solution. That’s golden feedback: it means your value story supports a higher price tag in their mind.
4. Persona-Based Value Mapping
Throughout these interviews, Monetizely pays close attention to who we’re talking to (end user, manager, executive) and how their answers differ. Enterprise buying is a team sport. Our research sessions often involve multiple stakeholders or are repeated with different stakeholder types. This allows us to map out, for instance, that a VP of Marketing values the analytics dashboard at X price, while a CFO evaluating the same product fixates on the ROI metrics and is willing to pay more if those are strong. By blending all these perspectives, we identify a pricing structure that resonates across the buying committee. Often it leads to packaging certain features for certain tiers or personas (e.g. an “analytics add-on” for the marketing team, included only in higher tiers that the CFO will pay for because it drives ROI).
Our sessions go beyond theoretical preference. They reveal how people actually think when faced with real trade-offs. Because we walk them through the product, clarify the value, and adjust the offer in real time, their feedback reflects true willingness to pay.
The output isn’t just a price, it’s a strategy:
- What to package
- How to tier it
- Which segment to target
- How to position your value in the sales pitch
And critically, it helps companies avoid underpricing. A customer might say: “If this solves my entire use case, I’d easily pay $100K. If it’s a narrow point solution, more like $30K.”
That’s value-based pricing in action. You now have the data to design a premium suite and a leaner entry point, both justified by the buyer’s own framing.
In short, Monetizely’s approach aligns your pricing with buyer reality, not internal assumptions. It sidesteps the noise of feature-by-feature surveys and instead focuses on how buyers truly perceive your product’s value.
The result?
- You capture the high end of WTP where the ROI is strongest
- And still justify pricing across segments with clarity and confidence
It’s a proven playbook for maximizing revenue and making your pricing IPO-ready.
Conclusion: Stop Leaving Money on the Table
In today’s SaaS landscape, where capital is tighter and competition is fiercer, you can’t afford pricing that “almost works.” If your market has a high willingness to pay, but your pricing doesn’t capture it, you're not just leaving money on the table, you’re underwriting customer value without seeing the return.
It's time to move beyond guesswork:
- Don’t copy competitors’ pricing without context.
- Don’t tinker with features in a vacuum.
- Don’t let outdated models dictate your growth ceiling.
Instead, lean into what actually drives results:
- Deep customer engagement
- ROI-driven value conversations
- Strategic pricing that scales with use and success
The best SaaS companies are already doing this, and it’s paying off in higher NRR, faster expansion, and greater investor confidence. But the rest are quietly bleeding revenue or being outflanked by more disciplined competitors.
The good news: this isn’t out of reach. As we’ve shown, with modern frameworks, we make it possible to uncover what your customers will really pay, how to package value clearly, and how to build pricing that earns its keep.
So don’t let high willingness to pay go to waste. Price like you mean it. Backed by real customer insight. Aligned to real business outcomes. Positioned to scale. Book a free pricing assessment with our saas pricing experts at Monetizely and find out how much more your product is worth, when priced right. It’s time to stop subsidizing. Start scaling.