Provide a platform or tool that allows product and business teams to control feature gating and usage limits directly, without requiring engineering resources. This would enable a monetization flywheel and make monetization a core product function.
Pricing in SaaS is changing fast because of AI. Salesforce is moving away from seats. Clay is leaning into credits. Stripe is investing in billing. Startups are raising big rounds to reimagine monetization, billing, quoting, and ERP from the ground up. Every vendor has a different point of view on questions like: Who owns pricing & packaging? Where the product catalog should live? Is billing a finance & accounting tool, a sales tool, a product tool — or all of the above? As Ryan Glushkoff once said: “Price is a number. Pricing is an architecture.” At Schematic, we're building the product based on our POV on optimal pricing architecture. We believe that Monetization has to start in your application — not your billing platform, not your quoting platform — with architecture that strategically decouples pricing logic from your application. Why? Because it’s in your app that you make decisions that are continuously evolving: • How and when to gate features and enforce limits • How to design the experience that drives adoption and expansion • How to showcase pricing and plan upgrades That’s why we believe the way you handle features and limits is where monetization begins. Ask yourself: Can you gate features and enforce limits — soft or hard — without pulling developers off core product work? If yes, you’re ahead of the game. If not, it’s one of the most important problems to fix. I share more on this point of view — and where it comes from — in this video and article (linked in comments).