Most B2B software charges per seat. We decided early that Elastly would not. You pay for the lines Elastly prices, and you can add as many people as you like.
It was not an obvious choice. Per-seat pricing is easy to explain, easy to forecast and what buyers expect. But it did not fit what Elastly does, and it would have pushed customers toward the wrong behaviour.
Seats punish the people who should be using it
Pricing touches more people than the pricing team. Reps quote. Sales managers approve discounts. Finance checks margin. Purchasing wants to see how cost changes reach prices. Customer service answers "why did my price change?".
With per-seat pricing, every one of those people is a cost line, so the business limits access. Pricing knowledge stays with the few who have a login, and everyone else goes back to asking a colleague or keeping a spreadsheet. A tool that explains prices only works if the people who face the customer can see the explanation.
“The value of a price explanation is the people who can read it.”
A line is the unit of value
What Elastly does is price lines: a quote line, an order line, a price request from a store or the API. That is where it earns its keep, line by line, in margin that was not given away. So that is what we charge for.
On our pricing page, a priced line is one line the engine evaluated, counted once per customer, SKU and day. Repricing the catalogue in a batch does not count. A distributor quoting a few thousand lines a month pays for that, whether five people use it or fifty.
Growing should not feel like a penalty
Two more decisions came out of the same thinking.
There are no overage charges. If you go over your plan's lines two months in a row, we move you to the next plan and tell you ahead of time. A busy month should be good news, not a surprise invoice.
The trial is the product running on your own quotes. For 14 days Elastly prices your lines in the background, in shadow mode, and nothing is written back until you choose a plan. You see the prices it would have sent next to the ones your team sent before you pay anything.
What it asks of us
Charging by the line keeps us honest. If Elastly does not price lines your team actually uses, your bill does not grow, and neither does ours. The only way for us to earn more from a customer is for the customer to rely on Elastly for more of their pricing.
That is the incentive we wanted: more value for you first, more revenue for us second, measured in the same unit.