Unveiling our pricing: Building trust through transparency

When Aayush and I started Clazar, we envisioned the kind of company we wanted to build. We aligned on the key principles that will serve as a North Star for our people. These key principles eventually became our Core Values. One such key principle was “Customer Trust.”

Too often, companies write principles in a document and then ignore them. An important aspect of our culture at Clazar is to take concrete actions based on the principles. Today, I’m excited to share with you one such concrete action that reinforces our focus and helps solidify our customers’ trust in us as partners. But first, let me provide some context.

Right from the early days, we knew that pricing would be a critical part of our success. Like many SaaS companies, we initially decided to keep our pricing private. This allowed us to be more nimble as we grew rapidly alongside our customers. But having scaled to where we are today, we recognize how pricing opacity lends to confusion – both for our customers and our own sales team.

A few weeks ago, we set out to solve that problem. Before we looked at the solution itself, Brian, our VP of Sales, helped us list down certain pricing principles that would guide us through the pricing project. They are →

1. Transparency → Our pricing structure should be simple and legible for anyone.
2. Predictability → Customers should know how pricing scales with their business.
3. Strong value-alignment → Increased value justifies increased cost.

Pricing customers based on the revenue they transacted on the marketplaces has been the norm in this industry. We, too, thought it offered customers the option to grow their contract with us proportionately to how their cloud marketplace revenue grew. However, having supported cloud GTM growth for businesses of all sizes, we now realize how it could also get in the way of their growth.

If the objective of a cloud GTM is to scale revenue (not costs), then it does not make sense to pay your vendor more just because you are driving high-value deals through the channel. Armed with that knowledge, we set out to revisit pricing dimensions for Clazar.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been moving towards pricing plans based on the number of completed Private Offers, and we’ve seen an amazing response from our new pricing model. Under the new pricing, some of our customers have already driven very large (7 and 8-figure) transactions! 🎉

This is what both Aayush and I always wanted Clazar to be – a trusted revenue growth partner for SaaS businesses.

Our customers are the reason we exist. We celebrate their 100th deal just like their first; we burn the midnight oil to add new capabilities and work aggressively to identify opportunities for improvement. To us, no other metric is as important as seeing them be more successful.

Charging our customers based purely on the number of POs they close and removing any revenue limitations in the process, in my opinion, offers the cleanest route to growth for them and the simplest way to exhibit value for us.

With that being said, I am excited to share our new pricing plans.