SaaS pricing strategy: models, real examples and the VAT rules

Open the price page of Spoki, the WhatsApp marketing platform run by NextAI from San Vito dei Normanni, near Brindisi, and you’ll find two prices stacked together. First a monthly plan: the Marketing plan shows €79 a month with the annual discount, against €99. Then a fee per message, €0.066 for every WhatsApp marketing template sent in Italy, at Meta’s rates. Operators are unlimited. ‘Tutti i prezzi sono esclusi IVA’: every price excludes VAT.

That’s hybrid pricing, now the most common model among the 230-plus software companies Kyle Poyar surveyed in April and May 2026. What follows is SaaS pricing strategy for a B2B founder, someone who sells to businesses rather than consumers. First five models, each on a real price page, and a value-based method. Then willingness-to-pay research, annual billing, VAT and Italian e-invoicing, and a worked example. Just starting out? Begin with the beginner’s map from zero to a first round.

SaaS pricing models: the five options, with real price pages

Stripe’s guide to SaaS pricing models lists the options most companies pick from. Here they are with live examples, Italian first, each from the company’s own pricing page.

Model	How the bill is calculated	Examples (checked 9 October 2026)
Flat fee	One price, whatever the use	Basecamp: Pro at $99 a month, Unlimited at $299 a month billed annually, ‘no per-user fees’
Tiered	Packages with different features or limits	Emailchef, Italian email marketing: three plans priced by number of contacts, ‘Prezzi iva esclusa’; Notion: Plus at $10 and Business at $20 per member a month
Per seat or per unit	Price times users, employees or another unit	Jet HR, Italian payroll platform: from €30 per employee a month; Slack Pro: $8.75 per user a month, $7.25 billed annually
Usage-based	Pay for what you consume	Twilio: $0.0927 per outbound SMS segment to Italy, pay-as-you-go
Hybrid	A subscription plus usage fees	Spoki: monthly plan plus €0.066 per WhatsApp marketing message in Italy; Intercom: from $29 per seat a month plus from $0.99 per ‘Fin outcome’ from its AI agent

Which one is winning? Hybrid, in Poyar’s 2026 State of B2B Monetization, though early-stage companies under $5 million of ARR (annual recurring revenue) still lean towards flat fees (37% adoption). And ‘three-in-four software companies changed either pricing or packaging within the last year’. Plan to revise yours.

Per seat or usage-based pricing? Choose the value metric first

The value metric is the unit your price grows with: users, employees, contacts, messages, locations. David Skok’s advice is to use ‘a pricing scheme that has a variable axis, such as the number of seats used, the number of leads tracked’, so revenue expands as the customer does. That’s how net churn turns negative, as our guide to churn rate and net revenue retention explains.

Seats are easy to explain and to forecast. Their weakness shows when value doesn’t follow headcount: one power user does the work of ten, or a team shares a login. Slack softens it by billing only active members. Anyone who takes an action within a 28-day period counts, and you get a prorated credit for people who go quiet.

Usage tracks value more closely, but the bill moves every month. Intercom shows where AI is taking this: seats for human agents, a fee per outcome for its AI agent, ‘no seats required’ for the AI alone. Price level shapes who stays, too. In ChartMogul’s December 2025 analysis, products under $50 a month retained ’20+ points worse than either B2B or B2C SaaS’.

Value-based pricing: a method in seven steps

Cost-plus pricing starts from what you spend. Value-based pricing is, in Stripe’s words, ‘customer-centric’. So you begin with the buyer instead and add up what the product gives them: hours back, extra revenue, a bit of convenience, a risk they no longer carry. The price goes between your cost floor and that ceiling. Here’s how we’d run it for a first B2B product:

1. Start narrow: one segment, one job. Installers with three to ten technicians who lose hours to scheduling would do.
2. Put a euro figure on that value. In the Brescia example below it’s half an hour a day per technician at €30 an hour; extra jobs and avoided penalties would come on top. Ten customer interviews will fill in those numbers. It’s the same legwork as when you validated the startup idea.
3. What would they do without you? Maybe keep a spreadsheet and a part-time administrator, maybe sign up for a competitor’s plan. Find out what that costs them.
4. Charge per technician, per location or per invoice: whichever unit grows as the value does.
5. Set the price at a fraction of the value and above your cost per customer, support and payment fees included.
6. Make sure each customer pays back their CAC, the cost of acquiring them, in a sensible number of months. The sums are in our guide to unit economics: CAC, LTV and payback.
7. Run a survey first and real offers second. After 6 to 12 months, hold the price up against churn and expansion.

How to test willingness to pay: the Van Westendorp survey

The Price Sensitivity Meter goes back to 1976, when Peter Van Westendorp introduced it. Every respondent gets the same four questions about one product:

• Too expensive to consider at all: at what price does that happen?
• At what price would it feel expensive, though you’d still consider it?
• And when would it feel like a bargain?
• How cheap would it have to be before you’d doubt the quality?

Plot the cumulative answers against price and the curves cross at four points; between the point of marginal cheapness and the point of marginal expensiveness lies the acceptable price range. SurveyKing adds two cautions. The ‘optimal price point’ doesn’t maximise revenue, and the method doesn’t measure true willingness to pay, which Gabor-Granger or conjoint analysis do better. It wants at least 100 completed responses per segment.

A seed-stage B2B startup with 40 prospects won’t get there. Ask the four questions in discovery calls instead, and treat the range as a starting point for real offers. A signed order beats any survey answer. Multiply the price you land on by the customers you can reach and you have the bottom-up market estimate from our guide to TAM, SAM and SOM.

Prices in Europe: VAT, euros and e-invoicing in Italy

Start with who’s buying. EU rules require sellers to show consumers the price ‘including any additional charges, such as taxes’ before they order. Business plans are usually quoted net of VAT, as Spoki and Emailchef do. Italy’s standard VAT rate is 22%. Price in euros for European buyers, too: the Italian pages above list euros, while Basecamp, Notion, Slack and Intercom showed us dollars.

Selling abroad changes who charges the VAT. On services to a business in another EU country you don’t usually charge it: the customer pays at home, under the reverse charge. Sell electronic services to consumers and the VAT of the customer’s country applies, declared for the whole EU through a single One Stop Shop registration. Below a €10,000 EU-wide threshold, your own country’s VAT can apply instead.

Then the invoice. Since 1 January 2019, transactions between parties resident or established in Italy have required electronic invoicing; flat-rate taxpayers have all been in since 1 January 2024. Invoices travel through the SdI, which delivers them to the customer’s PEC (certified email) address or recipient code. Selling to a consumer? They get an e-invoice as well: code 0000000, plus a paper or digital copy. Foreign customers get XXXXXXX in the recipient field, and that saves you filing the separate cross-border report. Check that your billing tool handles all this.

A worked example: three tiers and the revenue they imply

The company is invented; the arithmetic is the point. Picture a Brescia startup whose software schedules jobs for heating and air-conditioning installers. Interviews suggest it saves each technician about half an hour a day of calls and paperwork. At €30 an hour over 21 working days, that’s roughly €315 of value per technician per month.

Plan	Price a month, VAT excluded	Technicians included	Customers	MRR
Start	€59	Up to 2	60	€3,540
Team	€149	Up to 6	70	€10,430
Pro	€299	Up to 15	20	€5,980
Extra technician	€19 each		40 seats	€760
Total			150	€20,710

That’s €20,710 of MRR, about €248,500 a year, and €138 per customer on average. A Team customer with five technicians gets around €1,575 a month of value and pays €149, under 10% of it, and the extra-technician fee lets revenue grow with each account. Seed investors will ask for exactly these figures: see the startup metrics investors want at pre-seed and seed.

Now the billing choice. If half the customers take an annual plan with two months free, revenue at list price falls about 8.3%, to roughly €18,980 a month. In exchange you collect ten months of cash up front, and ChartMogul finds median NRR 10 to 20 points higher on annual plans. Two months free is a 16.7% discount, close to Slack’s 17%.

The price also decides how you sell: a €59 plan can’t pay for sales visits, as our guide to a go-to-market strategy for a B2B startup explains. On VAT, an Italian business customer’s Team invoice reads €149 plus 22%, €181.78. Then run the tiers through your startup financial model. Our financial model template (Excel, €129) runs five years month by month for SaaS, with runway, scenarios and a round simulator.

Checklist: your pricing page before launch

1. Three tiers at most, each named for the customer it serves.
2. One value metric, visible in the plan limits.
3. Euro prices for European buyers: ‘VAT excluded’ on business plans, VAT included for consumers.
4. Monthly and annual prices side by side, with the saving shown in euros.
5. Usage fees written as unit prices, with an example bill.
6. A free trial or free plan, its limits stated plainly.
7. A billing tool that sends Italian invoices through the SdI.
8. A date six months out to review prices against churn and expansion.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. VAT and invoicing rules change: check with your accountant before you set up billing.