Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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With your goals and segments clear, the next step is packaging. Packaging means building offers (the right mix of features, services, and terms) that match the buyer segments in your market. Each segment has different needs, a different willingness to pay, a different buying process, and a different idea of what "value" means. Your packages exist to capture as much value as possible from each segment.
Many companies start by building a "good-better-best" structure and dropping features into three plans. Done without a real understanding of what each segment values, this can backfire.
Picture dumping all your enterprise features into a top-tier plan without knowing what enterprise customers actually need. You may end up with customers picking a plan that does not fit, or discounting hard just to close. That leads to shelfware, where customers pay for features they never use, which hurts results over time.
It helps to think of packaging on a spectrum:
Single Tier: one price, one package, aimed at the mass market. It works when your market is large and uniform. Think of Basecamp’s original single plan.
Good-Better-Best (GBB): graded tiers aimed at different segments. It works when you have a large market with similar needs and you want deals to move quickly. The tiers usually map to segments by company size, buying complexity, or depth of need.
Modular: groups of features that unlock specific use cases. It works when your market is mixed: different industries, company sizes, use cases, and deal sizes. Here, capturing revenue per account matters more than speed, and every customer’s package looks different.
The general rule: the bigger and more uniform your market, the more you lean toward a single tier. Large but segmented, lean toward GBB. Smaller and more mixed, lean toward modular. Many companies blend these: a GBB core with modular add-ons, or a single consumer plan next to a separate enterprise offering.
What changes with agentic AI? The mistake agent companies make most often is designing packaging around their product instead of their buyer. They look at what the agent can do and build tiers around capability levels. But if those tiers do not map to real segments with different needs and willingness to pay, the packaging confuses the market or leaves money on the table.
The easiest way to see this is to walk through our five companies and look at how each one handles packaging. They run the full range, from packaging done well to packaging that serves almost no one.
Join companies like Zoom, DocuSign, and Twilio using our systematic pricing approach to increase revenue by 12-40% year-over-year.