Fynn GloverCo-Founder & CEO, Schematic · Co-founder & CEO of Schematic | Runtime monetization infrastructure for SaaS & AI companies

Stephen Bussey, CTO of Supered on the high bar for pricing & packaging changes in B2B SaaS

10 Oct 2024 · 2 min

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1:56

In this interview segment, the host asks Stephen Bussey, CTO of Supered, about the growing complexity of monetization in B2B SaaS, especially as companies move toward multi‑product suites and varied pricing models. Bussey explains that while many pricing tweaks can be prototyped quickly, certain changes—particularly shifting from per‑seat to usage‑based pricing—are highly cross‑cutting and painful to implement. He emphasizes that pricing structures involve many interdependent components such as usage triggers, overage handling, and billing logic, making frequent changes costly and risky. Consequently, product and engineering leaders must invest significant time upfront to design a pricing system they are confident in, rather than treating pricing as a throw‑away feature that can be altered on a whim.

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you have a ton of experience, not only building SaaS, but building monetization systems within SaaS companies. I'd love to talk about monetization as a topic. I mean, it's something that I think a lot of companies are thinking about. It's increasingly really complex to support the way we monetize our SaaS companies. I'm curious, what complexity do product and engineering leaders need to understand as they build? For example, earlier you mentioned one of the big trends you're thinking about is multi-product suites. So what are the real kind of levers of complexity that product and engineering leaders need to understand and consider as they think about monetizing their SaaS products?
Yeah, this is hard because this is what I tell the team when they bring like suggested pricing changes, for example. Is that most things in the business I can go like build in a couple days and have like a prototype and have it working. And if we need to like change something, it's not that big of a deal. I think this is one where that starts to flip a little bit where I actually say, hey, we need to be really careful about changing it because it's gonna be pain— like, I don't want to change this now and then a month also change it and then change it 2 months from then. Like, because it's, it's painful every time we have to change it. It's very cross-cutting, especially if they want to switch from like a per-seat model to like a usage-based model. Because then I need to add in all the different triggers for calculating usage and how, you know, what do you do when people are over? It's just like a lot of complexity goes into that. So I think being aware that like changing it can be difficult. Is important and that you should really spend some time making sure that you're happy with the thing you're putting together.