Price To Scale (2nd edition), written by Ajit Ghuman and Jan Pasternak is a serious operating manual for SaaS leaders who want pricing to move the numbers that matter, not sit on a slide.
It gives operators a repeatable way to drive ARR growth, raise ASP (avg selling prices) without stalling deals, expand NRR, and protect Margin by aligning what you sell, how you price it, and how you run it across product, sales, finance, and RevOps.
The book zeroes in on the hard decisions that control financial outcomes, namely what you package, which pricing metric you choose, what structure you use, and where you set the rate, then it shows you how to operationalize all of it so it actually works in the field.
A five step framework is introduced that starts with goals and segmentation, proceeds through positioning and packaging, selects a pricing metric that tracks value rather than vanity, sets prices with research and testing, and then installs the plumbing that turns pricing from an event into a system, which is how you compound results over time.
The authors do not stop at theory, they show you why packaging choices often matter more than the number on the tag for revenue capture, how misaligned pricing metrics create churn by breaking the link between what customers pay and how they win, and why expansions and renewals should be treated as a gold tier growth lever due to lower CAC and higher profit leverage.
There is equally practical guidance on pricing operations, deal desk, discounting, and contract terms, which is where margins are lost or protected, along with clear takes on pricing in a high interest rate regime and the real economics of GenAI, so leaders can make model choices that do not blow up cost of service as they scale.
The book has 13 full length case studies:
Zoom , DocuSign , Narvar , Gainsight , Mixpanel , Nosto , Oracle , Verint , Rubrik, Pushpay, Gitlab, Coralogix and more.
The case studies form a practical spine for the book and show how pricing and packaging decisions move hard financial outcomes when they are tied to how customers buy and how the business operates at scale
Beginning with Zoom where a sprawling add-on catalog was consolidated into coherent bundles and a Zoom One offer that simplified the online channel, reduced operational drag, and supported measurable enterprise gains including a reported net dollar expansion rate of 115 percent among large customers and growth in accounts over one hundred thousand dollars in trailing revenue, which is what you expect when you replace SKU bloat with a design customers can navigate and sales can run at scale .
Pushpay illustrates how to defend leadership when core capabilities commoditize by using segment-tuned pricing and packaging to protect subscription flow and transaction economics, a pattern that matters for net revenue retention in payments-linked models .
DocuSign’s transition from usage-based to feature-based pricing explains how structure and packaging recover average selling price when a pioneer faces saturation and table-stakes usage, which reframes growth from raw volume to differentiated capability.
HubSpot’s marketing-contacts change shows how cross-product metric conflicts create price resentment and churn risk, and how charging only for contacts that are actually marketed restored fairness and enabled cleaner expansion and renewal programs .
The section also covers Nosto’s evolution from a pure usage model to a blend with capability and platform elements so revenue tracks realized value rather than undifferentiated volume, and Oracle’s mobile messaging journey where highly variable carrier costs forced a redesign of pricing logic and operations to preserve margin while sustaining growth, a reminder that pricing operations and vendor economics sit at the heart of monetization decisions.
Coralogix then shows how aligning product architecture with the pricing metric widens the addressable base while protecting gross margin, using a unit model that lets customers mix logs, metrics, and traces by use case and pay per gigabyte at different rates, enabled by an “analyze before index” design that cuts storage cost and keeps unit economics intact as data scales, which is a blueprint for marrying technical choices to monetization so growth does not erode contribution profit .
Authors and orientation
Ajit Ghuman and Jan Pasternak bring combined operator rigor and enterprise pricing depth, add new chapters on organizational alignment, deal desk, and pricing in a high interest rate regime, and fold in case studies from companies like Zoom, DocuSign, GitLab, Squarespace, Narvar, and Coralogix, which anchors the framework in real decisions that affected revenue mix, margin, and growth.
The five step pricing transformation framework
The core of the book is a five step framework that treats pricing as a cross functional, sequential process.
Step One clarifies goals and customer segments so the business stops arguing about who it serves and what outcomes it optimizes, because misalignment at the top turns into friction downstream, missed fit in the field, and weak price realization.
Step Two designs positioning and packaging that map capabilities to segment needs, with the explicit reminder that packaging choices often have more impact on revenue capture than the list price itself because packages determine who buys what and how much value you can ethically charge for.
Step Three selects a pricing metric that tracks value from the customer’s point of view, which is the most consequential decision because a poor metric breaks the perceived ROI and raises churn risk.
Step Four sets rates with research and testing, using market context and willingness to pay without letting models outrun what buyers actually understand.
Step Five operationalizes the system, which means instruments, approvals, billing, CPQ, ERP, and enablement, because a beautiful model that cannot be executed will not change ARR, margin, or cash flow.
Packaging that earns revenue rather than leaks it
The authors push leaders to design packages that fit segments, avoid shelfware, and preserve headroom for expansion, which matters because overstuffed plans can suppress upsell lanes and reduce net revenue retention even as they simplify the grid. They call out the risk of making good better best too rigid and of bundling historically upsold capabilities into base tiers, which may look clean on the page but blocks future deal economics.
The pricing metric as the choke point of churn or growth
The book demonstrates that misaligned metrics create churn when customers are billed for growth in usage that does not correlate to growth in their business, which breaks the value link and pushes them to seek alternatives. It recommends moving to metrics that scale with how the customer wins, such as per MAU or per visit in the right context, and stresses that teams should consider packaging and metric changes before reaching for raw price increases on the base, because unearned increases harm trust and long term NPS even if they hit a quarterly plan.
Rate setting and structure choices
While rate setting is the visible outcome, the authors frame it as the fourth step for a reason, because the rate only works if the packaging and metric are right. Leaders should expect to calibrate linear, base plus usage, and threshold based structures to balance predictability with value capture, then test to confirm price acceptance before rolling broadly, which is how you protect win rates and keep cycles from slipping. The emphasis is on repeatable decisions that feed better ASP and better gross margin rather than on clever moves that cannot scale.
Operationalizing pricing so it actually moves numbers
The book treats pricing operations as an engineering problem, acknowledging that the ideal model is not always implementable on the systems the company runs, and that connecting product instrumentation, usage metering, CPQ, billing, and ERP can take months to years, which means leaders must pick workable designs that the organization can execute.
Deal desk, discounting, and contract terms as margin control
There is a pragmatic view of deal desk as a machine that raises win rate and speed while reducing random discounting and ASP scatter, by centralizing proposals, standardizing terms, controlling approvals, and generating analytics on win rates, cycle time, and revenue impact that feed continuous improvement. The book catalogs discounting levers like volume and early payment that grow order size or improve cash flow when used with clear policy, and it frames contracts as a financial instrument that sets expectations, protects liability, and reduces friction in service delivery and renewals.
Pricing in a high interest rate regime and the reality of software deflation
The authors argue that leaders should not hide behind inflation prints and should instead manage to regime change, since software often behaves deflationarily while funding costs and discount rates shift with interest rates, which forces companies to tighten monetization discipline and build models that can carry their own weight. The DocuSign example is used to illustrate commoditization pressure on price as markets mature, which calls for better packaging and expansion strategy rather than blind increases.
GenAI economics and pricing
The GenAI chapter explains why AI does not behave like traditional SaaS, since inference and training costs create persistent marginal costs and value is probabilistic, which changes how you choose models, how you package, and which metrics you meter. The authors quantify how closed models can drive high inference cost per customer and why open source choices can radically change unit economics, which is why you must tie pricing metric and technical design together before you scale.
Expansions and renewals as a core growth engine
The book makes a clear case that expansions and renewals carry lower acquisition costs and deliver the strongest profit leverage, which is why packaging should preserve upsell vectors and why GTM design must include explicit programs for mining existing accounts rather than treating growth as only a net new logo problem.
How a CXO reads this book
Taken end to end, the framework teaches a CXO, COO, CFO and a CRO to tie pricing work to financial control points, namely raise ASP through segment fit and metric alignment, increase NRR by designing for expansion and renewal lanes, improve gross margin by standardizing discount policy and controlling costly terms, and improve cash flow with early payment levers and contract hygiene, while instrumentation and deal analytics enable real time course correction rather than post mortems.
Bottom line
Price To Scale gives operators a way to run pricing like a core function, with decisions and systems that show up in ARR growth, higher price realization, healthier net revenue retention, steadier gross margin, and stronger cash flow, and it does so with a method you can implement rather than admire.
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