[abuehrle]

I have mixed feelings about pricing that scales with revenue. Most pricing ends up working this way, but at least when it's expressed as seats or usage it's a bit easier to justify the price tag. Revenue scaling pricing reads to me as "We'll give you the same thing, but you're making more, so pay us more." I simultaneously understand it, and it feels dirty to me, hence the mixed feelings.

[toomuchtodo]

I think scaling with revenue is appropriate (as you're aligning incentives), as long as it has a ceiling near the monthly fully loaded cost of a Controller role (which is right around ~$12,500 in the US). At that point (having a need for a Controller role), the customer should be doing between $40MM-$50MM in ARR/annual turnover. With that said, Finmark should expect to have to provide more value to a customer than a single Controller role would. This also might help with encouraging CFOs not to attempt to build finance fiefdoms (tools > headcount).

[ramie]

You nailed it. Our upper end of pricing is $5000 a month for companies doing up to $40M in revenue and caps out at $10,000 a month.

[zibbity-rw]

Thanks for clarifying this. I was worried about it too. Have you considered also providing a marketplace for bookkeepers, etc? That’s another pain in the butt with this process.

[ramie]

It is like you're looking at my pitch deck. We have zero interest in providing professional services but know that some of our customers will need CFO like help and so a natural partnership for us is outsourced accounting firms. Later this year we will open up reviews for bookkeepers so that our customers can interact to make those qualified recommendations to each other.

[toomuchtodo]

Solid model, product looks good. Wishing y'all much success.

[ramie]

I totally understand and can appreciate that sentiment. Here was our rationale for the current pricing model.

1) We don't want to charge an arm and a leg for pre-revenue/early stage companies to have access to our software. We wanted to find a scalable way to discount our pricing so that when you're early and cash strapped, you can still use us without price being a big factor.

2) As your revenue grows, then your company is going to be bigger, and you will have more people that will be collaborating in Finmark and more data that we will have to process. In essence, we think that revenue is linearly correlated with data and user usage across our app. Therefore, we don't think we are giving the same thing. Instead, the company is using us more and therefore we are charging more.

Curious if that resonates?

[tmpxgdqrcKFuG]

I don't mean this as a stink to Finmark but it's also a motivating factor to move on to something that better fits your needs as you get bigger instead of trying to squeeze everything out of a service designed for helping startups.

[ramie]

No offense taken at all. When I was running my last company, at $25M in revenue, we couldn't find any good options for a service like this. Anaplan and Adaptive Insights had 6 figure price tags and required a lot of professional services. At some point a company might choose to leave Finmark, but our hope is to cater to startups from pre-revenue to pre-IPO.