Why do SaaS companies with usage-based pricing grow faster?

Today we know of HubSpot — the maker of marketing, sales and service software products — as a preeminent public company with a market cap above $17 billion. But HubSpot wasn’t always on the IPO trajectory.

For its first five years in business, HubSpot offered three subscription packages ranging in price from $3,000 to $18,000 per year. The company struggled with poor churn and anemic expansion revenue. Net revenue retention was near 70%, a far cry from the 100%+ that most SaaS companies aim to achieve.

Something needed to change. So in 2011, they introduced usage-based pricing. As customers used the software to generate more leads, they would proportionally increase their spend with HubSpot. This pricing change allowed HubSpot to share in the success of its customers.

By the time HubSpot went public in 2014, net revenue retention had jumped to nearly 100% — all without hurting the company’s ability to acquire new customers.

HubSpot isn’t an outlier. Public SaaS companies that have adopted usage-based pricing grow faster because they’re better at landing new customers, growing with them and keeping them as customers.

Image Credits: Kyle Povar

Widen the top of the funnel

In a usage-based model, a company doesn’t get paid until after the customer has adopted the product. From the customer’s perspective, this means that there’s no risk to try before they buy. Products like Snowflake and Google Cloud Platform take this a step further and even offer $300+ in free usage credits for new developers to test drive their products.

Many of these free users won’t become profitable — and that’s okay. Like a VC firm, usage-based companies are making a portfolio of bets. Some of those will pay off spectacularly — and the company will directly share in that success.

Top-performing companies open up the top of the funnel by making it free to sign up for their products. They invest in a frictionless customer onboarding experience and high-quality support so that new users get hooked on the platform. As more new users become active, there’s a stronger foundation for future customer growth.