Here's the dominant logic of software pricing, stated plainly: the more valuable you become, the more we charge you. Per-seat means the bill grows as you hire. Per-contact means it grows as your audience grows. Per-transaction means it grows as you sell more. Every one of these ties the vendor's revenue to your success — which sounds fair until you notice what it actually does: it taxes the exact things you're trying to do. We think that's backwards, and the flat fee is our answer.
What usage-based pricing really taxes.
It taxes growth. Not abstractly — specifically. Per-seat pricing makes you hesitate before adding the teammate who'd make everyone more productive. Per-contact pricing makes you prune the list you should be growing. The pricing model inserts itself as a small tax on every expansion decision, and small taxes on good decisions compound into materially worse decisions over time. The vendor has aligned their revenue with your hesitation.
Pricing that grows with your success is pricing that profits from taxing it. Align the bill with growth and you've built a meter that punishes the customer for winning.
The flat fee as alignment.
A flat fee breaks the meter. You pay the same whether you have 5 users or 50, 500 contacts or 50,000. That means we make exactly nothing from your growth — and that's the point. It forces our incentives somewhere healthier: we can only grow by acquiring new customers and keeping existing ones happy, never by quietly taxing the success of the ones we have. Our interests and yours stop being in tension at the exact moment you start to scale.
The honest tradeoff.
We'll be straight about the cost to us: a flat fee leaves money on the table. The customer who grows from 5 to 50 people on the same bill is, in pure revenue terms, a customer we “under-charge” as they expand — and every per-seat competitor books that expansion as growth we forgo. We watch that number and we keep choosing the flat fee anyway, because the alternative is building a business that profits more the more it taxes its customers' ambitions. We didn't want that business.
Flat pricing is not the most lucrative model in software. It's deliberately not. It's a stance — that your software bill shouldn't grow just because you did, and that a vendor shouldn't profit from taxing the very things you're working to grow. One flat fee, however big you get. That's the whole manifesto.