Jason M. Lemkin argues that SaaS should prioritize customer-centric, fair billing practices and recounts personal experiences and market signals to illustrate current failures. He describes a frictionless cancellation experience moving from paid to free with Claude as an example of proper service, contrasts that with suppliers who now bill unused seats and make it hard to leave, and recalls Slack's early "fair billing policy" as a model. He notes market-level trends: Zylo reports the average number of SaaS vendors per customer is down, while Gartner reports SaaS spend is up 20%. Lemkin ties this to customer reluctance to add vendors, a rise in AI tool adoption for new capabilities, and a preference for consolidating within existing platforms (HubSpot, Salesforce) to reduce stress.
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Up 20% (according to Gartner, as cited).
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Deepseek is free too. I use some of them free. We pay for some of them. They're all great. And honestly, just as an experiment, I went from the free to the paid version of Claude and then I just tried out the cancellation process. Took one second. There were no games. They didn't tell me I had to wait a year there. I was not threatened, there were no issues. I just was able to downgrade to Free and then go right back. That's the way we want it, folks. We forget that the Last S in SaaS is a service. This is supposed to be a service and not an endless sort of games to process NRR in stressful times. And it's tough. Even some of the SaaS leaders we look up to the most are playing games around this, around, buying around what I'm buying, around, leaving around data that years ago they didn't play, they didn't play. Slack and Zoom never raised prices for years. Slack was disruptive in the early days because it implemented what it called the fair billing policy. And if you didn't use seats, they didn't charge you for them. And I remember thinking that was crazy at the first Sasser annual and asking Stuart Butterfield about it, he said, yeah, this is the way we have to do things today. We have to be customer centric. And I think for a while we got there. And then when SaaS got harder over the last couple years, for many, even if growth was there, it got harder. We stopped those fair billing policies, we kept billing for seats folks weren't using. We made it harder to leave, and we're back. And it's so tough now that honestly I am. I'm scared to buy. And it was interesting that Zylo, which is one of the vendors that helps you manage SaaS costs and vendors reported that the average number of SaaS vendors is down. It's down. And that's. I think there's a number of reasons, but it's not because spend is down. According to gartner, spend on SaaS is up 20%. And you can see us buying all these cool AI tools that do things we couldn't do before, that are creating this video, that are writing up Saster posts that are doing our clips. We could never do those things before and we're paying for them gladly. But beyond that, we're trying to standardize on the platforms we already use because it's just stressful to add a new vendor if we're already using HubSpot, if we're already using Salesforce, we're all asking ourselves, can we just do it in the apps we already have, so make it easier?
