Flat pricing, and never per client or per reviewer

A pricing decision I enforced in the schema rather than just on the pricing page.

The plans are flat monthly. Not per seat for clients, not per reviewer, not per document signed, not a percentage of anything invoiced. Clients and reviewers never appear on a bill because they never have an account.

Why this was non-negotiable: per-client pricing charges my customer for succeeding.

A freelancer whose client list grows is the exact person for whom the product is working, and metering them on it means the bill arrives at the moment they are most sensitive to it. It also puts a decision in front of them every time they add a client, which is a decision I do not want them to have.

Per-signature pricing is worse. The product exists to get a change order signed. Charging per signature is charging for the outcome the product is supposed to make effortless, and it teaches people to avoid the core action.

Then a specific one that gets skipped: the free tier is a standing plan, not a trial. It does not expire and it does not ask for a card. A free tier that quietly converts to a paywall after fourteen days is a trial wearing a costume, and it costs more trust than it earns revenue.

The plan limits live in one module that both the marketing site and the server read, so the pricing page cannot advertise a cap the server does not enforce, in either direction. Competitor prices quoted anywhere in the repo carry a recorded date and expire after 120 days — a stale competitor price is a false claim with a delay on it.

The tradeoff: I have given up the revenue expansion that per-seat pricing produces automatically, and I have to earn upgrades with capability instead of with growth taxes. That is harder. It is also the only version of this I would want to defend to a customer.

Has anyone moved off per-seat pricing deliberately, and did the expansion revenue actually come from somewhere else?