Jake McMahon
Led by Jake McMahon 8+ years B2B SaaS · Behavioural Psychology & Big Data

Pricing strategy for B2B SaaS.

Pricing is where product value, buyer tolerance, and revenue model meet. If those pieces do not fit, the spreadsheet will not save you.

This page is for teams trying to answer:

✓ What the model should do ✓ Where the page is not the problem ✓ How to change pricing safely
Read the guide See the next step

Plain English first. Value metric, packaging, and buyer fit second.

Pricing, Broken Down

01 — Value MetricWhat customers actually pay for and why
02 — PackagingWhat belongs together and what should stay separate
03 — Buyer ToleranceHow much friction the commercial model can carry
04 — Expansion PathHow the model grows without breaking trust

If pricing is misaligned with the product, the whole revenue system gets harder to run.

MOST UNDER-TESTED GROWTH LEVERPricing

Most B2B SaaS teams run A/B tests on onboarding flows but have never run a structured pricing test — despite pricing having 10x the revenue impact of most UX changes.

TYPICAL PRICING CALIBRATION GAP20–40%

The gap between what customers are willing to pay and what you're currently charging is usually measurable from usage data, upgrade behaviour, and willingness-to-pay signals.

BEST DIAGNOSTIC SIGNALFeature usage by plan

Which features are used by accounts that upgrade, expand, or churn tells you more about pricing structure than any survey.

WHY PRICING STRATEGY IS HARD TO GET RIGHT

"We set pricing two years ago and it's never been revisited"

"Our pricing page hasn't changed since our Series A. The market has moved, our product has expanded, and our customers are completely different now. But nobody wants to touch it because it feels risky and nobody owns the work."

CEO — B2B SaaS, $18M ARR

"We're leaving revenue on the table but can't see where"

"Our enterprise customers are paying the same as our mid-market customers. Some use the product every day across 50 seats. Some barely log in. We know the packaging is wrong but we don't have the data to redesign it with confidence."

VP Revenue — SaaS, $35M ARR

"Freemium is driving signups but not conversions"

"We added a free tier eighteen months ago. Signups went up. Paid conversions didn't. We're carrying free users who we can't convert and we're not sure if the problem is the product, the limit, or the upgrade prompt — or all three."

Head of Growth — PLG SaaS, Series A

"We don't know which features justify a premium tier"

"Leadership wants a higher-priced tier for enterprise. But we don't know which features enterprise accounts actually value, which ones drive expansion revenue, or how to structure a tier that would actually convert. The data is there — we just haven't connected it to the pricing work."

Chief Product Officer — B2B SaaS, $50M ARR

What It Is

Pricing strategy is the commercial shape of the product.

It is not just a number on a pricing page. It is the way the company decides what value to monetize, which buyer to serve, how to package the product, and how to grow revenue without creating friction the product cannot support.

Good pricing is visible in the value metric, the packaging logic, the upgrade path, and the way the team talks about change. If those pieces are inconsistent, customers notice faster than the finance model does.

That is why pricing changes should start with the product shape and buyer behavior, not the homepage copy.

Where Teams Get It Wrong

Most pricing problems are model problems, not page problems.

The number on the screen usually reflects a deeper mismatch in value, packaging, or buyer logic.

The team starts with the price before the value metric is clear.

If you cannot explain what the buyer is paying for, any number will feel arbitrary.

The packaging is trying to do too many jobs at once.

That is how plans become hard to compare, hard to buy, and hard to explain.

The team uses discounting to hide a weak model.

Discounts can close deals, but they do not fix the underlying mismatch between value and willingness to pay.

Pricing changes are launched without a test plan.

That creates confusion, support issues, and a lot of opinion after the rollout is already live.

What Good Looks Like

Three signs the pricing system is working.

01 — Value Metric

The buyer can see what they are paying for.

The pricing model matches a meaningful product behavior, not a random internal KPI.

02 — Packaging Fit

The plans map to how people buy.

The structure feels native to the buyer's decision process, not forced to fit a finance template.

03 — Safe Change

Updates can be tested before they spread.

The team knows what to change, what to watch, and how to roll it out without guessing.

How ProductQuant Approaches It

Start with product truth, then shape the commercial model around it.

Good pricing usually gets simpler once the team stops treating it like a debate and starts treating it like a diagnosis.

ProductQuant starts with Product DNA, buyer behavior, and the revenue motion already showing up in the data. Then the value metric, packaging, and change path are shaped around that structure.

If the issue is really positioning, the pricing audit often gets paired with competitive positioning. If the issue is really expansion or usage, the worksheet and workbook make the next step concrete.

01 — Diagnose

What the model is doing now

Look at product behavior, buyer fit, and current revenue motion before changing the page.

→
02 — Map Value

What the buyer pays for

Define the value metric and the packaging logic in plain language.

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03 — Test

What should change first

Use the worksheet and workbook to pressure-test options before a live rollout.

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04 — Roll Out

How to launch safely

Keep the change narrow enough that the team can learn from it.

When pricing matches product behavior, revenue gets easier to explain and easier to grow.

Related Guides And Proof

Go deeper from here.

These are the most relevant ProductQuant assets if you want strategy detail, change planning, or a real example of pricing work in context.

Guides
SaaS Pricing Strategy Guide
A practical walkthrough of pricing as a product-and-market decision, not a page tweak.
GuideStart→
Pricing Model Fit
How to tell whether the model matches the product's value pattern.
GuideRead→
Usage-Based Pricing Fit
When usage pricing helps and when it just adds confusion.
GuideRead→
Proof
Pricing Page Teardown: 5 SaaS Pages
What good pricing pages do when the model and message line up.
TeardownSee→
How to Raise Prices in SaaS
A practical view of price increases when the product has earned the right.
GuideSee→
Pricing DNA Backlash
Why some pricing changes trigger pushback even when the spreadsheet looks fine.
GuideRead→

CLIENT WORK

B2B SaaS — Pricing Analysis
20–40%
WTP gap identified from usage and upgrade data

Pricing Audit: From Packaging Confusion to Clear Tier Logic

Analysed feature usage by plan, upgrade triggers, and churn patterns to identify a significant willingness-to-pay gap. Produced a packaging redesign brief with a clear value metric and tier structure the team could test safely.

See the sprint →
PLG SaaS — Freemium Conversion
3 tiers
collapsed to a clearer two-tier structure

Freemium Redesign: Free Tier Limits That Drive Upgrades

Identified which features free-tier users were hitting before churning versus converting. Redesigned the free tier limit to hit naturally at the point of highest value, increasing upgrade prompt relevance without changing the product.

See the workbook →
Jake McMahon — pricing strategy consultant

WHO DOES THIS WORK

Jake McMahon

Founder, ProductQuant · MSc Big Data & Business Analytics · BSc Behavioural Psychology · 8+ years B2B SaaS

Jake approaches pricing strategy from the analytics layer first — which features drive upgrades, which usage patterns predict expansion, and what the WTP signals in your existing customer data say before designing any new packaging or price point. The background in behavioural psychology means pricing is treated as a decision-design problem, not just a revenue optimisation exercise.

Pricing strategy Packaging design Willingness-to-pay analysis Feature usage analysis Upgrade analytics PLG monetisation B2B SaaS Value metric design

COMMON QUESTIONS

Pricing strategy: what it is and what it should produce

Questions about your specific situation? Book a call →

How do you set pricing for a B2B SaaS product?+
Start from the value metric — what scales with value: seats, usage, features. Benchmark competitors but price to your willingness-to-pay data, not their numbers. The freemium vs paid-only decision should be based on your activation rate and support cost, not on what category leaders do.
What data do you need to evaluate whether current pricing is right?+
Feature usage by plan, upgrade and downgrade history, time-to-upgrade, churn by plan tier, and NPS by plan. This data usually exists in your product analytics and billing system and is rarely analysed together. The combination reveals where the packaging is misaligned with actual usage behaviour.
How do you test pricing changes without risking existing revenue?+
Test on new signups only; grandfather existing accounts. Use cohort comparison to see whether the new pricing changes conversion or expansion behaviour. Price anchoring tests via landing page can be run before changing checkout. This approach limits exposure while generating real signal.
What is usage-based pricing and is it right for B2B SaaS?+
Customers pay proportional to usage — API calls, seats, events. Good for high-variance usage patterns; risky if it creates billing anxiety in the buyer. A hybrid model (base + usage) often works better in B2B because it gives buyers predictability while letting the revenue expand with usage naturally.
How do you decide which features belong in which pricing tier?+
Features that drive upgrades go at the ceiling of the current tier. Features that signal high-value use cases go in premium. Use feature adoption by plan data, not intuition — the data usually shows which features correlate with expansion revenue and which ones are used uniformly across all tiers.
What is willingness-to-pay research and how do you run it?+
Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter or Gabor-Granger are the standard methods. Run with current customers via survey — 10–15 minutes is typical. Combine with usage data for the strongest signal. Survey data alone tells you what customers say; usage data tells you what they actually do. The combination gives you a defensible price point.

Best Next Step

Pick the step that matches the pricing gap.

This page is educational first. If you want help shaping the model or testing a change, these are the most relevant ProductQuant paths.

Pricing Audit
Best when the team needs a structural read on the current model before changing it.
Pricing Strategy Workbook
Use this when the team needs a concrete way to think through pricing options.
Pricing Experiment Worksheet
Use this to pressure-test pricing changes before a rollout.
Competitive Positioning
Use this if the pricing issue is really a positioning issue in disguise.

Pricing should fit the product, not fight it.

If the value metric feels unclear or the packaging debate keeps looping, start with the pricing audit or the worksheet.

See the pricing audit Open the workbook