Seat-based pricing is the default in B2B SaaS. The conventional wisdom is that it aligns cost with value — the more people use the product, the more you pay. It simplifies sales conversations. It makes revenue expansion predictable. For two months, we believed all of that. Then we looked at our data.
We launched with workspace-based flat pricing — one price for a team, regardless of how many people used the product. It felt right for an early product. But when we raised prices for new customers, some enterprise prospects pushed back: "we need per-seat pricing for procurement to sign off." That's a real objection, and we responded to it.
We introduced an optional per-seat model at $29/seat/month with a 10-seat minimum. Existing customers kept their flat pricing. New customers could choose.
Sixty days in, three things were clear:
Teams sandbagged seat counts.
When pricing is per seat, teams buy the minimum and resist adding users. We saw it clearly in onboarding: teams with 15–20 people were purchasing 10 seats and then not inviting everyone. The product was being used by fewer people, which meant it was delivering less value, which meant churn risk went up.
Finance approved it, operators resisted it.
The seat-based model did help with procurement conversations — we got more enterprise deals moving faster. But the actual buyers (operations managers, data leads) disliked it. They had to go back to finance every time a new person needed access. It created friction exactly where we didn't want it.
NPS diverged by pricing model.
Customers on flat pricing had an average NPS of 61. Customers on per-seat pricing had an average NPS of 44. Same product, 17-point difference. The per-seat group was using fewer features and inviting fewer people. Less usage, lower satisfaction.
We killed per-seat pricing. All new customers are now on workspace-based plans. We kept the per-seat option available for the handful of customers who specifically need it for procurement, but we don't lead with it and we price it at a premium to the flat plans.
The thing we didn't understand initially: for a product whose value scales with how many people use it — collaborative dashboards, shared queries, team-wide insights — per-seat pricing actively works against adoption. Every friction point in getting a new person onto the platform is a friction point against the network effects we rely on.
This is specific to our product and our customer profile. If you're selling a tool where value is clearly per-user (a personal productivity app, a seat-bounded license) and your customers have large, finance-driven procurement processes, per-seat probably does make sense. But if you're selling something where the value is collective — a shared workspace, a collaborative data product — it's worth running the numbers before defaulting to the industry standard.