Your Product Isn't Just SaaS: Monetisation's Other Faces

When the price tag becomes the product conversation nobody wants to have.

Jun 01, 2026

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Somewhere around 72% of SaaS companies will change their pricing model within the first 18 months of launch. Not because the product failed, but because the way they asked people to pay for it did.

These are product practitioners who've wrestled with the question most teams avoid: not "what should we build?" but "how should we get paid for it?" Nick Chasinov, Bart Krawczyk, Noa Ganot, Scott Middleton, Advait Lad, Bhavik Patel, and their fellow writers have turned monetisation from a finance team afterthought into a genuine product discipline, and their work in Product Coalition is a masterclass in thinking about money as a design problem.

I have been guilty of treating pricing as the last slide in the deck. You build the thing, you ship the thing, and then someone in a meeting asks "so what do we charge?" and the room goes quiet. The truth is, the pricing model is the product experience for a lot of your users. It shapes what they try, what they ignore, and whether they come back.

Nick Chasinov puts it bluntly in How To Select the Right Pricing Model for Product Monetization Opportunities: "The success of a product, apart from the product itself, often hinges on how a company chooses to leverage its monetization opportunities." He's right. And he goes further: "Setting a price involves several factors: costs, competition, profit margins, demand, pricing objectives, and more." Most product teams I know handle maybe two of those variables well and guess the rest.

The problem gets more interesting when you zoom out from individual pricing decisions to the business model itself. Bart Krawczyk wrote what I think is one of the most underrated articles in our publication: Products Don't Exist in A Vacuum: A Product Manager's Guide to Business Models. It is a reminder that the monetisation model isn't a lever you pull after the product is built. It is the architecture the product lives inside.

The Freemium Trap and the Upgrade Nudge

Here is a number that should make you uncomfortable: according to industry benchmarks, typical freemium conversion rates sit between 2% and 5%. That means up to 98% of your free users may never pay you a penny. The question is whether that 98% is working for you or against you.

Advait Lad digs into this in Freemium to Premium: How Companies Nudge You To Upgrade. The article maps out the psychological machinery behind the upgrade moment, from feature gating to usage limits to the subtle art of making the free tier feel generous but incomplete. It is a fascinating read because it sits right at the intersection of product design and commercial strategy, the exact space where most PMs feel least confident.

But here is the thing about freemium that rarely gets discussed honestly: it is not just a pricing model. It is a distribution model. The free users are not freeloaders. They are your marketing department, your word-of-mouth engine, your living proof that the product works. The conversion rate matters, but the virality coefficient matters more. If your free users are not talking about you, freemium is just an expensive demo.

Beyond the Subscription Box

The SaaS pricing conversation has gotten stale. Sriram Parthasarathy does a thorough job of mapping the landscape in The Right SaaS for You: How to Break Down SaaS Pricing Models. He explains that "Companies may need to experiment with different pricing models to find the best fit for their particular product and audience." That sounds obvious on paper. In practice, most companies pick a model at launch and defend it like a castle wall, even when the moat has dried up.

Serhat Pala takes this further in SaaS 2.0: When the Software Becomes the Worker, arguing that AI agents are about to blow up the per-seat pricing model entirely. When software does the work that humans used to do, charging per person makes no sense. You start charging per outcome, per task, per unit of value delivered. This is not a future prediction. It is happening right now.

The API Economy's Quiet Revolution

One of the most thoughtful monetisation frameworks I have read came from Scott Middleton. His multi-part series, API Monetisation: A Comprehensive Guide (Part 1) and A Comprehensive Guide to API Monetisation (Part 3): Indirect Monetisation, lays out how APIs have created entirely new monetisation surfaces. The indirect model is the most fascinating part: you give the API away or charge a nominal fee, and the real revenue comes from the ecosystem it creates. It is Stripe's playbook. It is Twilio's playbook. And increasingly, it is the playbook for any product with developer-facing surfaces.

The Price Experiment Nobody Wants to Run

Bhavik Patel asks the question that keeps pricing teams up at night: Are Pricing Experiments Unethical? It is a genuinely brave article because most product people will A/B test a button colour without blinking but refuse to test a price point because it "feels wrong." Bhavik makes a compelling case that not experimenting with pricing is the more dangerous option, because you end up charging based on gut feel and competitor mimicry rather than evidence.

He follows it up with You're Using the Wrong Metric for Pricing Experiments, which gets into the mechanics of what you should actually measure. Spoiler: conversion rate alone will mislead you. Revenue per visitor is a better north star.

When Customers Don't Actually Want Cheaper

Noa Ganot drops perhaps the most counterintuitive insight in this entire collection. In Do Your Customers Really Want to Pay Less?, she compares two service providers. One optimised for minimum cost and effort. The other optimised for maximum value delivered. The one that charged more won, because "even in times of an economic downturn lowering your prices blindly is not necessarily the right thing to do." Every PM who has ever panicked and slashed prices during a tough quarter should read this piece. Sometimes the customer does not want to pay less. They want to feel like they are getting more.

Marketplace Models: Aligning Incentives

Lucas Fonseca Navarro rounds out the picture with The Marketplace Starter Pack, arguing that "commission is always preferable when possible, and the reason for this is that you guarantee the greatest retention of value for your company." Commission-based models are the ultimate incentive alignment: you only make money when your users make money. He notes that platforms like eBay capture around 10% in commission while advertising-based models capture less than 1%. The gap tells you everything about which monetisation model has real staying power.

And then there is Gabriyel Wong with A Revenue Growth Model That Breaks the Price War Conundrum, who brings behavioural economics into the conversation. When everyone in your market is racing to the bottom, the answer is not to race faster. It is to change the race entirely.

What I Am Hearing on the Podcast

Three recent conversations on the podcast have all circled around the same uncomfortable truth: most product teams treat monetisation as someone else's problem until it is too late.

Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility and pricing strategist who teaches at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, put it most directly on EP83:

"When it comes to SaaS pricing, most executives think that what you charge determines your success. In fact, who and how you charge determines your success."

Dan's advice was to spend most of your time on what the price tag goes on and very little time on what number goes on the price tag. The packaging decisions, the price metric, whether you charge per seat or per outcome or per API call, those structural choices are where the real leverage lives. He also called out a pattern I have seen everywhere: "There's really only three ways to grow a SaaS company: acquisition, retention, and monetization. In that zero interest rate environment, the only thing that gets any oxygen is acquisition. Retention is not really considered and monetization is sort of an afterthought." That afterthought era is over.

Nicole Segerer, a monetisation specialist with over a decade at Revenera and Flexera, reinforced this on EP93:

"It is important to start counting before you start monetizing."

She was talking about usage intelligence, the practice of instrumenting your product to understand how customers actually consume it before you build a pricing model around it. Her warning was sharp: "When companies implement too quickly, without having the right data, monetization models go wrong. And when that goes wrong, you have a customer satisfaction issue. Then you've got to retract and change your pricing models, and that erodes trust."

Nicole also challenged the lazy use of "subscription" as a catch-all: "Subscription always gets used as this broad talk term. 'Oh yeah, we monetize as a subscription.' But really that's not the statement. The statement is what is your subscription based on?" With AI reducing the number of human users in many software products, she argued that per-seat subscription models may need to be fundamentally rethought.

And Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, connected it all to a wider product leadership crisis on EP74:

"It's a return to the old values of product from the early 2000s, that it was a commercial role. And particularly in the last 5 to 10 years, it's become a highly technical role, and the commercials have almost been secondary and left behind."

He is talking about Scrum and agile, but the monetisation parallel is exact. We have spent a decade training PMs to be technically excellent, to understand APIs and data pipelines and system architecture, while the commercial muscle has quietly atrophied. Monetisation strategy is not just a finance problem. It is a product problem. And if you cannot have a meaningful conversation with your CFO about how your product makes money, you are only doing half the job.

So here is the question worth sitting with: if your product's pricing model was invented before your product existed, who is actually making the monetisation decision? The answer, for most teams, is "someone who left three years ago." And that should terrify you more than any competitor launch or market downturn. Because the companies that win the next decade will not be the ones with the best features. They will be the ones who figured out that how you capture value is itself a product decision, one that deserves the same rigour, the same experimentation, and the same creative ambition as anything else on your roadmap.

The writers featured in this issue are doing something that matters: they are treating monetisation as a product discipline, not a business team handoff. They are the PMs who sit in pricing meetings and actually have opinions backed by frameworks. They are the builders who understand that how you charge shapes what you build. Nick Chasinov mapping monetisation opportunities, Bart Krawczyk connecting business models to product architecture, Noa Ganot challenging the "cheaper is better" assumption, Scott Middleton dissecting API economics, Advait Lad reverse-engineering the freemium nudge, Bhavik Patel making the case for price experimentation, and Lucas Fonseca Navarro aligning marketplace incentives. This is what Product Coalition exists for: giving working practitioners a platform to share the commercial thinking that rarely makes it into product conference talks.

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Sources

👋 Jay

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