Practical pricing insights for SaaS and IoT scale-up founders.
Maarten Laruelle Aikido Security made its AI pentest 20 percent cheaper to run and passed the cut on to customers. On cost-based versus value-based pricing, Heinz versus Bic as a brand model, and the pricing decisions nobody calls pricing decisions.
Maarten Laruelle Three angles from The Price of Influence by Claire Wang: your stakeholder is the buyer, packaging is not display, and the status quo is the competitor.
Maarten Laruelle Peter Janssens, product director at Yesplan, on why the unit of pricing comes before the price point, the negenproef of product management, and why product and pricing are the same job.
Maarten Laruelle Nicolas Giraud, founder of CFO as a Service, on pricing in due diligence, margin leaking into goodwill, why AI does not make him cheaper, and Flemish modesty as the real pricing mistake.
Maarten Laruelle Sebastien de Halleux (Playfish, Saildrone, Graph Ventures) at Wintercircus Ghent on the two walls that tell you when to stop, going global from day one, swimming upriver through a fund's portfolio, and the envelopes.
Maarten Laruelle Frédérique Joos, tech lawyer and partner at Cambrian, on how your contract decides your pricing power: pricing through time, the mutual renewal clause most founders forget, and variable AI costs in contracts.
Maarten Laruelle Yorick Bloemen, co-founder and CFO of Timeseer.AI and CFO of Hyperfox, on why pricing is a commercial problem, why a hundred percent discount beats free, and the budget simulation tool every startup CFO should build.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from the Vlerick M&A Conference. Buy and build on one track, AI on the other, and by the end of the day both told the same story: producing things is heading to zero cost, and the judgment about what to do with them is where the value moved.
Maarten Laruelle Omar Mohout wrote Lean Pricing thirteen years ago and now does M&A for tech companies at Deloitte. On why pricing is the biggest lever in the three years before an exit, the contract trap, and why you should not sell your company alone.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from Off The Radar Brussels with Mistral, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Cloudflare, ElevenLabs and Google DeepMind. When anyone can build anything, the scarce thing is deciding what is worth building — and who pays to keep it running.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from Wintercircus Ghent with Steven Muylle (Vlerick) and the founders of Donna. How a 40-person AI startup actually runs on AI — one marketeer for the whole department, and what that means for pricing.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from the Startup Awards panel with Julie Dumoulin (Spotable) and Aline Muylaert (Go Vocal). Two companies at very different stages, one conclusion: you can't skip the founder-led phase of international expansion.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from Winter Circus Collective in Ghent. How Payflip's co-founder hires bar raisers: the 15-minute enthusiasm call, a scripted three-phase process, strict scoring, and no salary negotiation.
Maarten Laruelle Two real cases showing when credit-based pricing solves a genuine problem — revenue predictability for SMBs and procurement friction at enterprise — and the architecture decisions that make or break each design.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from David Du Pré's masterclass at Winter Circus. Missionaries vs mercenaries, drivers vs passengers, the 12-month failure question, and why functional fit vs emotional fit is really a pricing problem.
Maarten Laruelle Notes from Wintercircus Gent with Roeland Delrue (Aikido Security) and Cameron Deatsch (ex-Atlassian). Two completely different companies, two different growth stages, but the same underlying thread about scaling.
Maarten Laruelle From a conversation with Dylan Mendes of We Are Sales: seven things about pricing that keep coming up in every scaling company.
Maarten Laruelle Not all AI is created equal for pricing. Three distinct categories of AI features need three different pricing approaches. Here is the framework I use after working with several scale-ups adding AI to their products.
Maarten Laruelle Aikido Security reached €16M ARR in 3 years with radically simple pricing. Not through value-based pricing, but by deliberately ignoring it. Sometimes market capture is your value capture.
Maarten Laruelle Product managers make pricing decisions every day without realizing it. Three common mistakes that cost real money, and what to do about them.
Maarten Laruelle A beer tour entrepreneur in Belgium discovered that simplifying pricing for additional participants led to higher revenue. The lesson: shield your customers from your internal cost structure.
Maarten Laruelle Outcome-based pricing ties fees to measurable results, but customers often resist when they invest heavily in achieving those outcomes themselves. Here is what actually works.
Maarten Laruelle A case study in asset management showing how to handle four pricing dimensions by splitting into two distinct models: comprehensive for critical assets and simplified for peripheral ones.
Maarten Laruelle A modern pinball machine costs between €12,000 and €15,000 for collectors but far less for arcade operators. The same product, two completely different markets. Here is why that matters for SaaS pricing.
Maarten Laruelle A pricing workshop revealed that user-based pricing can disadvantage certain customer segments. Evaluating two distinct profiles showed the need for a more nuanced approach.
Maarten Laruelle When pricing AI workflow solutions that span multiple departments, you face a fundamental choice: discount for land-and-expand, or charge a premium for multi-department orchestration value.
Maarten Laruelle Documenting every pricing decision in a central tool like Miro, Notion, or Obsidian can save your organization thousands by preventing repeated mistakes and preserving institutional knowledge.
Maarten Laruelle A nine-step framework for building a pricing strategy that reflects the value you deliver, from customer portfolio analysis to setting the right price point.
Maarten Laruelle A structured customer interview template with seven sections designed for recent customers, helping you gather practical pricing and product insights.
Maarten Laruelle Rob Fitzpatrick's Mom Test teaches us to ask better questions in customer conversations, avoiding false positives that lead to misguided pricing and product decisions.
Maarten Laruelle The actual six-section customer survey template with ready-to-use questions. A companion to 'A template for structured customer surveys' with the complete interview guide.
Maarten Laruelle A practical six-section customer survey template designed for startups facing high churn, focused on uncovering the real reasons customers leave and what would make them stay.
The Pricing Guide covers SaaS pricing strategy from A to Z.
Read the Pricing Guide