We capped our CRM at CHF 350/month flat. Here's what that bet did to the business
I spent about 12 years building software inside Swiss regulated banks before leaving to build an AI-native CRM for German-speaking SMBs. When we set pricing, we made a call that most SaaS people I talked to thought was a mistake. We charge CHF 25 per user per month, standard so far, but we put a hard cap at CHF 350. Past that point you stop paying per seat entirely. Add 20 users, add 200, the invoice stays at CHF 350. You cannot pay us more even if you wanted to.
The reasoning was about our specific buyer. Our customers are conservative Swiss and DACH SMEs, the kind of firms that have run the same accounting software for fifteen years and distrust anything that feels like it will quietly get more expensive as they grow. Uncapped per-seat pricing reads to them as a penalty for adopting the tool: hire more people, pay more for software you already have. That friction kept surfacing in early sales conversations, so we put a ceiling on it.
What that actually did:
The sales conversation got dramatically simpler. "Your bill can never exceed CHF 350" took a whole category of objection off the table, and for a risk-averse buyer, predictability turned out to be a feature in itself. It resonated more than any AI capability we led with.
It also honestly signals who we are for. A cap that low means we are not chasing large enterprises where per-seat economics would print money. That was never our market, and saying so out loud built more trust than pretending we were for everyone.
The obvious cost is expansion revenue. The per-seat playbook exists because land-and-expand works, and we deliberately capped our own upside on our biggest accounts. We are betting that lower adoption friction and lower churn from a price people perceive as fair beats the expansion curve over time. That bet is not fully settled, and I will admit it is the part that keeps me up.
What I would do differently: I would have been more deliberate early about anchoring the flat cap as a premium promise rather than a cheap one. "Capped" can accidentally signal "budget tool" if you are not careful, and undoing a low-price perception is hard.
Curious whether anyone here has run capped pricing, especially selling into conservative or risk-averse markets. What did it do to your expansion numbers over a couple of years?
(Disclosure: I'm the founder of Uliasti, the team behind the product: Advanzo. Happy to go into detail in the comments.)
The cap bet becomes measurable at seat 14, where the marginal seat turns free. Compare accounts just below and above the cap on invited-seat activation, weekly active seats, logo retention, and support cost. If capped accounts actually deploy more broadly and stay longer, you can price the trust dividend; if they only add dormant seats, you are just donating expansion revenue.
That’s exactly the right way to frame it: the cap only earns its keep if free marginal seats translate into real adoption and retention, not vanity seat counts.
We’re tracking activation and weekly active usage across the threshold, along with retention and support load. The comparison around seats 13–15 is particularly useful, although we’ll need enough accounts and time before claiming causality.
"Price the trust dividend" is a great phrase. If broader deployment doesn’t create measurable downstream value, then yes, we’ve simply donated expansion revenue.
Since you’re still short on accounts, I’d preregister the checkpoint now: compare accounts that cross seat 14 with similar accounts holding at 10–13, then call the cap a win only if activated-seat ratio and retention rise without support hours rising faster. It won’t prove causality, but it keeps the later pricing decision from being rewritten around whichever metric looks best.
That’s a smart way to keep us honest. We’ll define the checkpoint.
I’d track absolute activated seats alongside the activation ratio. But the core test is right: stronger adoption and retention without disproportionate support costs. If that doesn’t happen, the cap hasn’t earned its keep.
Hey Dejan — quick follow-up: CancelKit is wrapping up billing setup this week, and I'm opening a few early access spots to indie SaaS founders before public launch — free during beta + a lifetime discount for the first 10. Given the "bill went up" churn angle from your post, thought it'd be a good fit to catch that moment. Happy to send details if you're interested.
Hey Yakup, I appreciate the offer, but it’s not for us at the moment. Thanks, man.
This resonates hard from a different category. I'm building in payment recovery, where the default pricing is a percentage of whatever the tool claws back, and it creates the exact friction you're describing - the more value you get, the more you pay, so success quietly turns into a tax.
I went flat for the same reason you capped. A bootstrapped buyer distrusts anything that scales its bite as they grow. Churn Buster starts at $149/mo and scales with MRR, Churnkey starts around $250, both with a sales call to go higher. Flat and public was the one axis I could actually own against them.
BTW, did the CHF 350 cap ever cost you a genuinely large account that would happily have paid per-seat? Or did the trust it bought more than cover that? That tradeoff is the part I can't model yet on my own pricing.
Great thoughts! Thank you.
That’s exactly how I think about it as well. Once customers feel they’re being “punished for growing”, pricing starts working against adoption instead of supporting it.
For me, it also comes down to how we actually want to build the business. Chasing maximum revenue per customer is one strategy, but scaling has costs too... For example: higher expectations, more complexity, more support, more sales pressure, and those costs are rarely discussed publicly.
My goal is to serve a group of companies that are often overlooked by enterprise software, build genuine long-term relationships based on trust. If customers feel we’re on their side instead of constantly looking for ways to increase their bill, that’s a competitive advantage in itself.
I don’t spend much (or any) time thinking about the revenue we could have made with per-seat pricing. As long as the business is profitable (our income is greater than our costs).
I’d rather build a company that customers love buying from than optimize every account for maximum extraction. Time will tell whether that’s the best economic decision, but it’s the kind of business I want to build. :)
I think the trust position is genuinely right and I'd make the same call. The part I'd push on is that it doesn't get you out of running the numbers internally, and a cap actually makes that easier rather than harder.
Once the price is capped, your maximum revenue stops being a pricing question and becomes pure account arithmetic: CHF 350 times however many accounts you can realistically serve. That's a projection you can run this afternoon with zero new data, and it tells you the account count you need before the cap is a nice story rather than a working business. The checkpoint being discussed above measures whether the cap earns its keep in adoption terms, which is a different question from whether the ceiling clears your cost base at all.
You did name profitability as the bar, and income above costs today is the right floor. The reason I'd still want the ceiling written down is that "time will tell" is fine for a feature and expensive for a pricing model. By the time the data arrives you've usually signed a cohort of customers at that price, and moving a published flat number afterwards costs you exactly the trust you built it for.
Do you know what account count CHF 350 has to be multiplied by before this works at the size you actually want the business to be?
To answer your question, I'd be happy with 10k accounts. :)
10k x CHF 350 is about CHF 3.5M a month, which is a great thing to aim at. The number I'd still write down is the smaller one underneath it, because under a flat cap your revenue per account is fixed while your serving cost isn't, and for an AI-native CRM it grows with how heavily someone uses you. That makes your heaviest accounts your thinnest, so the count that matters is where CHF 350 still covers them.
I agree.
And that would mean that "we have a luxury problem to solve" :)
Smart positioning. The cap is not just a pricing decision, it reduces perceived risk and gives conservative buyers a clear reason to trust the product. The real test will be whether stronger adoption, lower churn and easier referrals outweigh the lost expansion revenue, but for this market, predictability may be more valuable than feature depth.
Thank you!
One thing I’ve learned is that people don’t always buy the product with the most features, they buy the one they feel most comfortable committing to. For many SMEs, reducing uncertainty is just as valuable as adding another AI capability.
If predictable pricing leads to more customers, better referrals, and longer relationships, I’m happy to leave expansion revenue on the table. :)
Same instinct on our side, different reason. CancelKit is a flat $29/mo, no seats, no usage tiers — partly for the same "buyer distrust of creeping bills" reason you describe, but also because we spend all day looking at why people hit cancel, and "my bill went up and I don't know why" is one of the most common exit-survey reasons we see, right up there with "didn't use it enough." Predictable pricing isn't just a sales-objection killer, it's pre-emptively removing one of the top reasons people churn in the first place. Would guess your capped pricing shows up as lower churn more than lower expansion — the two aren't always the trade you'd expect.
That’s a really interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought about it through the lens of exit surveys, but it makes a lot of sense.
"My bill went up and I don’t know why" is exactly the kind of feeling we want to avoid. If predictable pricing removes a future reason to churn, that’s probably more valuable than squeezing out a bit more expansion revenue.
Thank you for sharing this.
I like that you treated pricing as part of the positioning, not just the monetization.
For your market, removing uncertainty may create more trust than extracting maximum revenue. That's a strategic tradeoff, not just a pricing decision.
Exactly. That was the thinking behind it.
Especially for SMEs, the biggest friction is often uncertainty rather than the actual price. If prospects know upfront what they’ll pay and what they’ll get, the buying decision becomes much easier. We’d rather optimize for trust and long-term relationships than squeeze out every last franc from the first deal.
I'm glad it resonated.
Reading your reply gave me one thought about the long-term consequence of optimizing for trust that I'd rather explain in the context of your business than try to squeeze into a thread.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?