The Future of SaaS Pricing? Help Scout’s Big Bet on Outcome-Based Models
For years, SaaS startups followed a particular playbook for success—grow at all costs.
Bring in a constant stream of new logos to unlock seemingly unlimited funding. Double, no triple, your headcount. Charge for licenses, by the seat, or for “premium” features.
But those days are over. In the wake of the funding collapse, go-to-market leaders had to adapt fast. Profitability is the name of the game now. That means companies need a revenue generation strategy that doesn’t churn customers as quickly as they’re onboarded. The team at Help Scout might have cracked the code.
My job as CRO is to think of new ways for growth, and consumption-based pricing was both a better value metric and economic engine.
“My job as CRO is to think of new ways for growth, and consumption-based pricing was both a better value metric and economic engine," said Andrea Kayal, Chief Revenue Officer at Help Scout. "Driven by our CEO, who had a strong vision of the product and what we wanted to enable for our customers, contact-based pricing led to a natural pivot.”
Unlike the SaaS status quo, which charges by number of users or access to features, consumption-based pricing (also called outcome pricing, usage pricing, or value pricing) charges by result, outcome, or usage. For Help Scout, that means “contacts helped.”
Value-based pricing is poised to be the new “it strategy” for go-to-market (GTM). Predicted by Jon Miller, Co-Founder of Marketo, and heralded by GTM Partners as “Service as Software,” the new path to success means solving customer challenges and providing immediate ROI. And they’re willing to pay for it.
“You're paying for the result,” Kayal said. “Unlike users, contacts is truly a measure of the value that's being driven.”
But not everyone is convinced the bet will pay off just yet. Completely restructuring how you ascribe value and dollar signs to your product requires massive organizational change and customer enablement. And investors or stockholders don’t like hearing you’re losing users.
“Businesses are afraid of usage pricing because they don’t know how it will affect stock prices or valuations,” said Cliff Simon, CRO at Carabiner Group, a part of SBI Growth. “The question is how do you make the change to usage pricing while maintaining financial fidelity?”
For Help Scout, the answer was to make the pricing change about more than just numbers. It needed to be a realignment with its mission.
Aligning Pricing with Product and Mission
Founded in 2011, Help Scout is a customer communication platform where support teams can manage interactions in a shared inbox, set up FAQ chatbots, and more.
“For a long time, customer support teams embraced what I call a “deflection” mindset: more automation, lower costs, and fewer people talking with customers,” Help Scout CEO Nick Francis wrote on LinkedIn. “But winning companies don't operate that way today. Instead, they prioritize *delight* over deflection. They see support as a growth driver; a channel for boosting referrals and retention.”
Referrals and retention are the golden ticket in today’s market. Acquiring a net new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one. Add on the expansion and referral possibilities, and the math on prioritizing value, delight, and retention checks out.
With a larger goal of championing delight over deflection and a long-term vision of how their product should evolve to meet market demands, Help Scout turned to pricing consultants Monevate to run the numbers.
“We looked at price elasticity to make sure we weren't underpriced or overpriced for certain segments,” Kayal recounted. “When considering a free tier, we did a lot of modeling to account for customers who would move to that free plan, as well as new customer impact.”
After more than a year of market research, restructuring, and internal enablement, Help Scout launched its four new pricing tiers in January 2025. All include unlimited seats and unlimited access to Help Scout’s AI tools. Yep, even the free plan.
Perhaps even more unusual in the business world, Help Scout promises a fair billing policy, meaning the number of contacts helped is determined on a rolling three-month basis. This helps account for seasonality and is 34% less variable in cost than per-seat billing, according to the company.
“It was a pricing model change, but it was a product unlock change for us as well,” Kayal said. “This shift was a perfect storm of putting the customer first, embracing new revenue strategies, building a long-term vision for the company, and realizing the impact AI will have on the customer support segment.”
In Consumption-Based Company
Content management giant Box has a similar approach to Help Scout, offering unlimited storage and unlimited users on every pricing tier. But unlike Series B Help Scout, which focuses on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Box is a public, 2,500+ employee company with a large enterprise segment. The newly launched Enterprise Advanced plan includes access to three new products, the most interesting of which is Box AI.
As AI agents become commoditized, you need to price your product based on the value the agents provide
“As AI agents become commoditized, you need to price your product based on the value the agents provide,” Simon said. “Box essentially gives away its AI agent in exchange for a high ROI outcome like turning unstructured data into structured, usable data. Companies are willing to pay for that.”
Putting the consumption in consumption pricing, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff let it slip that the company is considering charging around $2 per interaction with its Agentforce AI to offset fewer users and higher productivity among its customers. Salesforce is doubling down on AI, laying off 1,000 employees to make way for about 1,400 new AI-related roles, but is still beholden to the many stakeholders questioning the loss of users.
“I come from a payments background,” Simon said. “So I can see a future for SaaS pricing that includes a platform fee and a usage fee.”
While industry giants and scrappy startups are still sorting out the specifics of this pricing model, Kayal and Help Scou are betting on value and customer outcomes over transactions.
“It's going to be much easier, I think, for customers to know if they're getting value from your product,” Kayal said of outcome-based pricing. "You need to consider implementing this pricing change not only through the lens of new ARR, but also the impact to NDR (net dollar retention) and churn."
6 Steps to Adopting an Outcome-Based Pricing Model
Overhauling your pricing model isn’t easy. It impacts every team and your customers. But done right, Kayal explains how it can set you up for long-term success in current market conditions. To successfully switch to an outcome model, follow these steps:
1. Get Buy-In From the Top
The number one requirement for overhauling pricing? Kayal says it’s a CEO fully committed to the mission.
“You need leaders who are committed, optimistic, and excited,” Kayal said. “Honestly, I think it's 80% of the reason it'll be successful or not.”
Change is hard. Especially when you need to maintain business as usual while orchestrating a total operational, product, and messaging overhaul. A leader who can rally the troops and provide a strategic vision is vital.
2. Align with a Value Metric
The reason behind a pricing change needs to be about more than making money. It’s a new way of building your revenue engine around product value. Tying pricing to a core metric representative of that value is how you make this model work.
Contacts helped is the value metric at Help Scout, but for a FinTech company, it might be transactions processed or for a marketing automation platform it could be campaigns run. You need to find the metric that most closely aligns with the desired outcome of your product.
If I were a CRO, at another company, it would be my first question. How do we better align the value metric from seats?
“If I were a CRO, at another company, it would be my first question,” Kayal said. “How do we better align the value metric from seats? CROs need to be thinking about it if they're not already.”
3. Run the Models Again and Again
Before you can really move forward with this process, you need to make sure the numbers work. Is your business ok with some short-term losses as long as revenue grows over the next 5 years? How will this impact both new and existing customers? Will revenue actually grow at all? As Kayal put it, you need to be ok with failure.
“I would absolutely say that a pricing agency and amazing FP&A (financial planning and analysis) is a requirement,” Kayal stressed. “We needed to do a lot of modeling to make sure this felt right to us.”
4. Invest in Internal Enablement
With so many moving parts, clear communication is needed every step of the way. For Help Scout, it started with a vision and a brief from the CEO, turning into a centralized project plan with “marching orders” for every team—like marketing testing pricing pages, sales getting feedback from prospects, and account management pitching the pricing changes to existing customers.
“We constantly went back to Nick’s original brief and project principles like a constitution,” Kayal said. “We checked our choices against the doc, asking if they violated any of our established principles. It was very helpful to make decisions because so many people needed to constantly contribute.”
5. Roll It Out Slowly
While new customers can see the value and feel the impact of a pricing change right away, managing the process for existing customers is trickier.
Budgets have already been set. Customers are used to what they receive in exchange for their money. Will they need to fit in new training or onboarding? There's a lot of change management and unknowns that can pop up on a customer-by-customer basis.
That's why Kayal said it will take two years to migrate existing customers to the new pricing model. Help Scout is offering them the chance to move sooner, but doesn't want to push customers into a new plan they might not be ready for.
"There are many great reasons NOT to move away from an industry-standard pricing model," Francis wrote. "For example, migrating existing customers will be a multi-year process — a post for another day. But if our mission is to empower teams to delight customers, and our pricing ultimately makes that difficult, it's a risk worth taking."
6. Stay Committed to the Long-Term Vision
“The journey doesn't end with the launch,” Kayal said. “That’s Day 1.”
Despite the months of preparation, launch day is only the beginning. There will be customer migrations, adaptations, and learnings after the new pricing page goes live. But, if you are committed to the long-term goal behind the pricing change, Kayal said you will get to your desired end state. You just have to stay the course.
The future of SaaS pricing?
So is consumption-based the future of SaaS pricing? It's definitely a viable option. Success in today's market will be determined by the outcomes delivered and the value customers gain from your product. Tying your pricing to value just makes sense.
"I would say consumption-based might not be the route everyone needs to take," Kayal said. "But tying to a value metric where your economic engine, the core way you generate revenue, is tied to value over users is the way."