Press & media.
Software Pricing Partners works on the questions the market is asking right now — AI monetization, usage-based and consumption pricing, and how software companies architect pricing without breaking the business. CEO Chris Mele is available for interviews, background, and expert commentary.
Software Pricing Partners (SPP) is a B2B software pricing strategy and execution consultancy, founded in 1982. SPP helps software companies design and operate the architecture behind their pricing — the licensing, packaging, and pricing decisions, made continuously rather than as one-off projects — and runs LevelSetter, the platform that monitors and refines pricing models against real transaction data. SPP’s clients have produced $134.9 billion in exit value across more than 50 acquisitions. CEO Chris Mele is ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts.
Use the paragraph above as the standard boilerplate. SPP is privately held.
- Founded: 1982
- CEO: Chris Mele — #1 on OpenView’s B2B SaaS pricing experts list
- Focus: B2B software pricing architecture (licensing, packaging, pricing) and AI monetization
- Platform: LevelSetter — the software SPP uses to run client pricing continuously
- Client impact: $134.9B in exit value across 50+ acquisitions
- Structure: privately held
Chris Mele
CEO of Software Pricing Partners and the architect of LevelSetter, ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris began his career at Ernst & Young, later founded BreakFront (an angel-funded B2B software company), and joined SPP in 2014 to build the tools that became LevelSetter. Quote SPP and you get the pricing architect — not an associate.
LevelSetter runs the pricing infrastructure end-to-end so the experts focus on the calls only humans can make. It scales practitioner judgment — it doesn’t replace it.
Read more about Chris →We were questioning consumption pricing five years before the AI backfire.
In May 2021 — when the trade press was declaring subscription pricing dead and usage-based models the future — Software Pricing Partners published It’s Wise to Question the Big Assumption about Consumption Pricing. The argument then is the argument now: the real decision was never consumption-versus-subscription, it was the value metric beneath either model. Years of work followed. By August 2025 — well before the backfire reached the trade press — SPP was warning that software companies were bolting on AI features driven by hype rather than clear value, and that their pricing would pay for it. On May 22, 2026, SPP placed GitHub Copilot at the most-exposed end of a five-position consumption-risk spectrum and diagnosed why the model backfires: it meters customers while they are still discovering what AI is worth. When Copilot’s new pricing took effect on June 1, the backlash bore the diagnosis out. SPP keeps a running, sourced field guide of the cases.
What SPP argues comes next is the fix: the software market is re-running the cloud playbook — bounding consumption with reserved-instance and committed-spend models rather than abandoning usage pricing — and the same bounded options are now reappearing as vendors walk back pure-metered AI billing.
- It’s Wise to Question the Big Assumption about Consumption Pricing — the original thesis, published May 2021.
- Generative AI Pricing Challenges — the AI-specific warning, published August 2025.
- The five-position AI pricing spectrum — the framework, published May 22, 2026.
- When usage-based pricing backfires: a field guide — the running catalog of cases.
- Why variable AI pricing suppresses exploration — the mechanism in depth.
- The full AI-pricing body of work.
Chris Mele is the CEO of Software Pricing Partners and the architect of LevelSetter. He began his career at Ernst & Young, where he helped build the first credit-card system on Netscape for Bank of America. He later founded BreakFront, an angel-funded B2B software company, and joined SPP in 2014 to build the tools that became LevelSetter. He is ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts, a Business of Software speaker, and a Forbes Tech Council contributor.
AI monetization and agentic-AI pricing; usage-based, consumption, and credit-based pricing; value-metric selection; pricing-model transitions; SaaS pricing architecture; and pricing diligence for private equity and venture investors.
Since 2021. When the trade press was declaring subscription pricing dead, SPP published It’s Wise to Question the Big Assumption about Consumption Pricing, arguing the real decision was never consumption-versus-subscription but the value metric beneath either model. That thesis ran through five years of work on continuous monetization, GenAI pricing, and credit-based pricing’s fatal flaws. In May 2026 it became a five-position consumption-risk framework that placed GitHub Copilot at the most-exposed end and diagnosed why the model backfires. SPP’s contribution was not predicting individual incidents, which were already underway, but giving the market a framework to read them and a prescription to fix them.
The answer the cloud market already proved: bound the consumption. Reserved-instance and committed-spend models gave buyers predictability without dropping usage pricing, and the same bounded options are now reappearing as vendors walk back pure-metered AI billing. The deeper fix is not metering customers during the phase when they are still discovering what the product is worth — that is when an unpredictable bill turns exploration into a budget line and buyers pull back.
SPP’s clients have produced $134.9 billion in exit value across more than 50 acquisitions. The firm was founded in 1982 and is privately held.
Email press@softwarepricing.com. Chris Mele is typically available for interviews, background, and commentary within the same business day. Logo and high-resolution headshot are available on request.
Working on a story?
If you’re working on a story, Chris Mele is available for interviews, background, and expert commentary on B2B software pricing and AI monetization — usually within the same business day. Logo and high-resolution headshot available on request.
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