Like many of you, I've spent years on both sides of the table: paying for enterprise SaaS and building/scaling businesses. One particular area has always felt economically irrational: the per-seat CRM license.
When a salesperson costs $100k in fully loaded comp, why does the tool that enables them cost an extra $500-$1,000 per year? The core software function—a digital rolodex with a simple pipeline—simply doesn't carry the infrastructure overhead to justify that price escalation.
The Broken Economics
The $14/user/month pricing model is not about covering marginal compute cost; it's a legacy strategy that creates two massive points of friction for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs):
The Anti-Growth Penalty: As a former CEO and CFO (with a background in finance/ops), I saw this firsthand. Pricing tied to headcount means every hiring decision carries an immediate, non-value-adding software overhead. The marginal cost of adding a user should trend toward zero; instead, it's a fixed tax, actively penalizing a successful team's growth.
Feature Bloat as a Price Anchor: Incumbent CRMs add layers of complex, unused features (AI scoring, deep marketing automation) not to serve the SMB user, but to justify their enterprise pricing floor. This bloat requires more training, slows down adoption, and violates the principle of "Stupid Simple" tools.
Our Experiment: A Rational, Flat-Rate Model
Out of this frustration, we built SimpleCRM. This wasn't just about building a better UI; it was about demonstrating a rational pricing model that aligns with SMB value.
We surgically removed the bloat, focusing only on the core utility: Contact Management, Pipeline Tracking, and Tasks.
The critical shift: We moved to a flat-rate, per-team model—e.g., $25/month for a team of 10. The pricing is stable regardless of whether you hire one rep or five. Our cost is tied to the value we provide to the company (clarity, pipeline management), not the number of logins. This makes the software an operating expense of the business, not a tax on the employee.
We're testing the hypothesis that focusing on core utility at a radically transparent, flat-rate price is the future for most B2B tools used by growing teams.
What other segments of SaaS—beyond CRM—do you see suffering from this same per-user, anti-growth pricing flaw?
ThePoetDL•4mo ago
When a salesperson costs $100k in fully loaded comp, why does the tool that enables them cost an extra $500-$1,000 per year? The core software function—a digital rolodex with a simple pipeline—simply doesn't carry the infrastructure overhead to justify that price escalation.
The Broken Economics The $14/user/month pricing model is not about covering marginal compute cost; it's a legacy strategy that creates two massive points of friction for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs):
The Anti-Growth Penalty: As a former CEO and CFO (with a background in finance/ops), I saw this firsthand. Pricing tied to headcount means every hiring decision carries an immediate, non-value-adding software overhead. The marginal cost of adding a user should trend toward zero; instead, it's a fixed tax, actively penalizing a successful team's growth.
Feature Bloat as a Price Anchor: Incumbent CRMs add layers of complex, unused features (AI scoring, deep marketing automation) not to serve the SMB user, but to justify their enterprise pricing floor. This bloat requires more training, slows down adoption, and violates the principle of "Stupid Simple" tools.
Our Experiment: A Rational, Flat-Rate Model Out of this frustration, we built SimpleCRM. This wasn't just about building a better UI; it was about demonstrating a rational pricing model that aligns with SMB value.
We surgically removed the bloat, focusing only on the core utility: Contact Management, Pipeline Tracking, and Tasks.
The critical shift: We moved to a flat-rate, per-team model—e.g., $25/month for a team of 10. The pricing is stable regardless of whether you hire one rep or five. Our cost is tied to the value we provide to the company (clarity, pipeline management), not the number of logins. This makes the software an operating expense of the business, not a tax on the employee.
We're testing the hypothesis that focusing on core utility at a radically transparent, flat-rate price is the future for most B2B tools used by growing teams.
What other segments of SaaS—beyond CRM—do you see suffering from this same per-user, anti-growth pricing flaw?