Growing to an 8-figure ARR in three years with savings-based pricing

Andrew Alex noticed that businesses were hemorrhaging money due to unecessary SaaS licenses. So, he built a tool to monitor redundancies. Three years later, Spendbase has an eight-figure ARR.

Here's Alex, on how he did it. 👇

Getting started

My background is in marketing. I studied core marketing principles, business communication, and the broader business landscape at university. That foundation exposed me to advertising, product development, distribution, sponsorship, and shaped my thinking about customers and problems.

From there, I moved into product management in tech. I understood how products were built, how teams operated, and what it took to solve a problem people cared about. Eventually, I knew I wanted to build something of my own.

That became Spendbase, a spend management platform helping companies take full control of their SaaS, cloud, and corporate spending. The idea came from a painfully common problem: Businesses lacked real visibility into their software spending.

Today, Spendbase has grown into a full platform covering software and cloud discounts, license tracking, vendor negotiations, procurement workflows. Last year, we also launched digital banking and virtual corporate cards. We're a bootstrapped team of 200+ across the Americas and EMEA, backed by Google for Startups, Mastercard, and the EU's Seeds of Bravery program.

We don't share exact numbers publicly, but we have an eight-digit ARR and 300% YoY growth. Spendbase supports over 800 businesses worldwide - including Preply, Lemon.io, MacPaw, Happy Monday, and YouScan. The Sifted 250recognized us as one of Europe's most promising startups, and last month, Forbes placed us #20 among the Best Startup Employers of 2026.

I'm also the cofounder of KOLO, a charity fund from Ukraine's tech community supporting defenders on the front lines.

Finding a painful problem

It all started with a relatable moment. A friend casually mentioned he still had access to a company-paid software license worth $3,000 two years after leaving that job. Nobody had noticed.

At another company I knew, they renewed ten licenses of a $10,000 product, but only one person actually used it. And in one particularly painful case, they canceled a marketer's subscription after she left, and four years of critical marketing data disappeared overnight.

Once I started looking, these weren't edge cases; they were everywhere. Most companies still managed their entire SaaS stack in spreadsheets, with no visibility into what they used, what they forgot, or what silently drained their budgets.

I couldn't stop thinking about how to fix that. We founded Spendbase in early 2023 to give companies that clarity back.

Building the solution

We started by solving the most painful, visible part of the problem: giving founders, finance, and operations teams a centralized place to see all their SaaS subscriptions and usage.

The MVP was a visibility and tracking tool, a much smarter replacement for the spreadsheet most finance teams relied on. From that foundation, the product grew quickly, adding renewal management, vendor benchmarking, procurement workflows, and eventually last year, digital banking for startups and corporate cards with spend limits.

For day-to-day operations, we have a typical startup suite: HubSpot, Slack, Google Workspace, etc. Recently, we’ve been promoting Claude for company-wide adoption. And of course, we eat our own dog food — we manage our own SaaS stack, procurement, and spending through Spendbase itself. 

Beyond the tooling, when we launched virtual banking and corporate cards, we built the financial layer directly into the platform. That convergence necessitated significant compliance work. We had to meet global PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 standards. This was our first time pursuing these certifications, and because our product was still in development, we moved fast on code changes. We passed PCI DSS in nine months.

Timing changes everything

We launched Spendbase just three weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

We had just finished the MVP and assembled our first team, and overnight, everything changed. Team members had to relocate across Europe and North America, and we had to rebuild everything from scratch. That experience taught us the value of diversification, resilience, and proactive planning in a way no business school course ever could.

Today, we have relocation plans, distributed teams, and business continuity protocols built in by design.

Savings-based pricing

Our model centers on a simple, bold promise: For every dollar a customer invests in Spendbase, we deliver two dollars in measurable savings — guaranteed. We call it savings-based pricing, and it's central to everything we do. Instead of charging a flat subscription fee, we tie our success directly to the outcomes our customers achieve.

This completely changes the sales conversation: We're not selling features, we're selling results. It immediately builds trust and lowers the barrier to adoption.

Supporting startups is also central to our mission. Our digital banking for startups is free because we know firsthand how vital every dollar is in the early stages. We were in that position not long ago, and that experience inspired us to build a financial ecosystem that helps startups save and scale smarter.

We also help startups access up to $100K in AWS credits through Spendbase. It’s not just about free infrastructure; it’s about giving teams the freedom to test, experiment, and innovate without worrying about the bill.

Organic growth levers

As far as growth, the ROI story sells itself. Showing a company they can optimize their software costs by 39% makes the conversation easier. Our savings-based model means we only win when customers win, which builds word-of-mouth quickly.

The second lever is channel partnerships. We work with finance consultancies, VCs, and tech ecosystems to reach decision-makers faster. 

And third is product-led growth. Free virtual cards and banking tools get teams into the platform. Once they experience the visibility and control, they naturally expand into the optimization layer.

Recognition also helped, and being backed by Google, Mastercard, and the EU's program gave us credibility in markets where we were still unknown.

Unfair advantages

Beyond that, here are a few things that stand out as advantages:

• Obsessing over the problem, not the solution. We didn't set out to build "another SaaS tool." We couldn't stop thinking about a specific problem — invisible software waste — and that obsession got us through every hard stretch.

• Capital discipline. Being bootstrapped forced us to stay efficient from day one. We didn't have the luxury of burning money on vanity metrics, and it made us a stronger company. Every decision had to tie back to real customer value.

• Building in public. Transparency with customers about what we're building, how pricing works, and what savings look like has built the kind of trust that's very hard to buy with advertising.

Relationships, discipline, and experiments

Here's my advice:

1. Build relationships before you need them. Investors, mentors, and partners help more when they already know you. Start those conversations early, with no agenda.

2. Be disciplined with your resources. Most startups fail not from a bad idea, but from running out of time or focus. Stay lean, keep your priorities clear, and ensure every dollar and week creates real value for real customers.

3. Build an experimental mindset into your culture from the start. Maintain a pipeline of hypotheses. Not all need to be big. Our AWS credits program started as a small, uncertain hypothesis. Today, it's one of our core revenue drivers.

What's next?

The big vision is to become the financial operating system for modern companies: a single place where businesses manage every dollar they spend, from SaaS and cloud to payments and banking. 

In the near term, we're expanding the product into treasury management, payables automation, and deeper accounting integrations. Geographically, we've built a strong base in Europe, and we're now actively pushing into North America, where the opportunity is significantly larger. We're also continuing to scale our partnerships with VCs, finance consultancies, and tech ecosystems to reach more companies faster.

The mission stays the same: Help companies stop wasting money they don't even know they're spending.

The best place to follow along is our website at spendbase.co. You'll find product details, case studies, and the latest on what we're building. And you can connect with me on LinkedIn.