Aikido lowered a price. I would not have.

In March I sat at the 1 Million Club of Scaleup Flanders, hosted by Roeland Delrue at Aikido Security in Ghent. 16 million ARR, 1,700 paying customers in three years, a pricing page with four plans and no upsells. I wrote afterwards that Aikido plays a different game, that market capture is their value capture, and that they could always shift to value capture later.

On 15 September I was at the Wintercircus Collective for the follow-up, with Louis Jonckheere (General Manager North America), Thijs Janse (CRO) and Madeline Lawrence (co-founder and Chief Growth Officer). Louis threw out a number in passing, 60 million ARR, up from 20. So I sat down expecting to hear how the shift had started.

But there was no shift, they even lowered a price.

The 20 percent

Aikido sells an AI penetration test. Every software company has to do a pentest once a year, and until recently that meant humans trying to break your software and writing a report. Aikido does it with agents. This summer they made that test 20 percent cheaper to run, fewer tokens, more efficient.

Louis said 99 percent of companies would keep the price and pocket the margin. The founders did the opposite and passed the 20 percent on to the customer. We are not going to screw our customers, he says. He filed it under customer obsession, next to Roeland in over 2,000 Slack channels and an answer within ten minutes on a Saturday at 8 pm.

Where I disagree, sort of

This can work, but let me ask the question I would ask any founder at the table. Did the value for the customer change? Same pentest, same report, same yearly compliance box ticked. No. Your cost changed. And a price that follows your cost down teaches your customer that price follows cost. The day your token bill goes up, or your agent starts doing three times more, you have a customer who expects the discount to keep flowing in one direction.

I have been having this exact conversation all summer with founders adding AI features to their product. The cost per call moves every quarter, sometimes down, sometimes up when the model gets better and you use more of it. If your price is glued to that cost you spend your life explaining invoices. If your price is glued to what the customer gets, the pentest report, the passed audit, the saved week of a security engineer, the token bill is your problem and not theirs. Which is logic, and which is why I would have put the 20 percent into the roadmap or a new tier, not into a lower invoice.

Now the other side, and it is a fair one. Aikido competes with companies that are at least ten times bigger, in a market Thijs calls a red ocean, and the whole growth machine runs on being better and cheaper with zero friction. Roeland told me in March they could still go down in price. So the cut is consistent with everything they said six months ago. I was the one predicting a shift, and I was wrong on that one.

Heinz, Bic and 25 million

Madeline’s talk was about brand, and it was a pricing talk in a marketing coat. She lined up Velcro, Pampers, Tupperware, Spa and Bic, all brands that became the generic name for the thing, and nobody cares which one you hand them. Then Heinz. Half a room in the US answers Heinz when you ask what they eat with fries, restaurants got caught refilling Heinz bottles with generic ketchup, and Heinz turned that into a campaign. That, she says, is durable preference: your product is the obvious choice and every alternative feels wrong.

Durable preference has another name in my world. Willingness to pay. A brand that makes alternatives feel wrong is a brand that can charge for it. Aikido spends 25 million on marketing this year, 45 to 60 next year, has spent two million on billboards in San Francisco since last October, and Madeline was clear they are in the first inning of building that preference. Half a million of it went to stickers this year, by her own estimate, and she would rather not look at the P&L to check (@Madeline, if there are a few left, I would not say no).

So why build Heinz and price like Bic? I asked myself that during her talk, and I assume the timing is the reason. The preference is not there yet, certainly not in the US, so price stays the weapon. A brand takes years to build and price expectations are set per invoice. Every customer who saw their pentest bill drop this summer now knows Aikido as the vendor whose price goes down. That is a preference too, just not the one the 25 million is buying.

The pricing page as a sales weapon

Funny anecdote from Thijs. Before he joined, he booked a demo with Aikido’s three biggest competitors, from his Gmail. One never replied. One took two weeks. The third had a junior rep qualify him, then a session with a salesperson and a technical person, and when he wanted to see pricing, that was another session. Companies doing 100 to 500 million a year. Aikido’s prices have been public since the day I first looked at them, and Roeland’s “no need to talk to sales” was on the homepage in March. Not sure how much revenue that transparency is worth, but I know which demo I would have bought.

A very friendly pit bull

One more, because it is a pricing decision nobody calls a pricing decision. A Tuesday night, 9 pm, a customer paying about 3k a year asks a question in the app. Within seconds the CTO answers, then Thijs, then two reps, then a 20 minute technical call. The customer had been planning to evaluate CrowdStrike and Snyk and wrote back that this was unreal.

In my pricing playbook that service level lives in a tier, you pay for it. At Aikido it lives in the brand, everyone gets it, and Thijs wants every rep to be a very friendly pit bull. The cost to serve is real, they just decided the brand pays for it instead of the customer.

Where that leaves my March post

Six months ago I wrote that Aikido could shift later. Louis, Thijs and Madeline made clear there is no later planned, the focus is making the US twice the size of Europe first. My playbook says capture value once the preference is there. Theirs says the preference is the value. I said the same thing in March and they went from 16 to 60 million since. Which is logic, for the game they play. I still would not have given the 20 percent away.

Maarten Laruelle, founder of Tsjirpa, a pricing practice for start-ups and scale-ups building or rebuilding a recurring business model.