For services firms
building products.
You productized a model, a tool, or a workflow you used to deliver as labor. Pricing instincts built for people and hours will misprice a product that is built once and then runs for everyone who licenses it.
That product needs a price of its own, sitting beside the services the same clients already buy from you. We work the pricing architecture for that product with your partners and your product lead in the same room. Your team operates the result.
The tool went out inside three engagements before anyone asked what it was worth. A fourth client now wants it on its own, and the firm has to name a price for something it has always handed over. A services rate card cannot price a product.
Your pricing instincts were built for labor.
Your firm prices labor well, and those instincts were built over decades of practice: rate cards, scoped statements of work, a blended rate that carries the risk of a long engagement. All of it is sound for people and hours.
AI moved the question forward. As automation absorbs work a consultant used to do by hand, what you deliver comes unhooked from the hours you bill for it. The firm either prices the product deliberately or keeps handing it over inside the engagement and absorbing the cost.
The fixed-fee tool
You built a model to solve one client’s problem, it lived in a spreadsheet for years, and now you charge a flat fee for it. The fee was set to feel fair beside the engagement that produced it. Nobody has tested what it does when the tenth client wants the same model.
The tool you gave away
It sat inside the service fee, or it was free because free won the work. One firm we worked with found the untangling was the hard part: clients expected AI to cut hours billed, so the tool read as a fee reduction rather than a product. Which tools belong on a price list is the first half of that question.
The bespoke build that keeps repeating
Every build started as a one-off. Three of them turned out to be the same build under different client names. Deciding which parts standardize into a product and which stay custom is a packaging decision, arriving before anyone in the firm called it that.
The advisory gate
Your advisory work drifts toward scope and outcomes while the software wants a recurring price on a unit that grows. Where the gate sits between the two decides how much of each revenue line survives the other, and most firms discover they set it by accident.
The recurring layer nobody priced
Hosting, maintenance, support, the release you ship to keep it running. That is recurring revenue your firm has never carried before, and it usually disappears into a services line until someone goes looking for the margin.
Chris Mele
Ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris ran a B2B software company before he did this work. The conversation with a services firm starts where you are: partners who have to agree on what the product is worth, a services P&L that already works, and a client base that has never paid you for software.
LevelSetter carries the ingestion and the modeling, so the expert hours go to the calls only people can make: which unit the product is sold by, where the gate between advisory and product sits, and what your installed base will accept.
Read more about Chris →Licensing, packaging, pricing.
In that order.
Pricing software beside services is a licensing decision before it is a price decision. Licensing comes first because it settles the unit the software is sold by: a seat, a model run, a client account, a case processed, a report produced. For a productized method that unit is usually whatever your client counts when they tell their own board the work happened. It is the value metric, and every decision below it inherits from it.
Packaging comes second, and it is where the gate between advisory and product lives. What ships inside the software, what stays an engagement, what your team still builds bespoke for a client who asks. Editions are the instrument. Getting that boundary wrong is how a firm ends up giving the product away to protect a services relationship that was never at risk.
Booz Allen Hamilton faced both sides of this. Software the firm built out of its own consulting expertise was going to displace work it was being paid services fees to manage, so the product had to earn back more than it took away. And a capability everyone had filed as an optional add-on turned out to be central enough to the platform’s value that it belonged in the base package.
Pricing comes last in that order because a price means nothing until the unit and the package are settled. Fixed fee, recurring, consumption, or a shape that changes as your installed base migrates. The level question becomes answerable once the two decisions above it are made, and the pricebook is where the answer lands.
A buyer pays more for a business they can model forward, and plenty of firms in this position are pointed at a sale. Pricing that is instrumented and repeatable transfers with the asset. A firm that arrives at diligence with the architecture living in a founder’s head spends the window defending it.
Where a services firm starts.
Start with the Assessment, on the product
The Pricing Architecture Assessment is free and it takes a few minutes. Run it on the product you are building. Your services pricing is a separate question, and the product is the one in front of you.
Read the deal record you already have
Pricing Ground Truth pattern-matches your own line-item deal record, won and lost, against our pattern library. For a firm selling services and software to the same buyers, what surfaces first is usually how much product value is already travelling inside services deals for nothing.
Design the architecture with your people in the room
A pricing architecture expert works licensing, packaging, and pricing with your partners and your product lead together. In a services firm those are frequently the same few people, so the trade-off between engagement revenue and product revenue is made by the people who carry both numbers.
Your product team operates it
The architecture ships into LevelSetter and your team runs it: pricebook, approval governance, and the deal analytics that show whether the unit you chose is behaving. SPP stays on call for renewal cycles and for the architecture refresh when the product changes shape.
Your firm has a product team now. That team needs a pricebook, pricing surfaces, and deal analytics it can operate without rebuilding them on every engagement. LevelSetter is that foundation, built and maintained by a professional product team with a roadmap behind it. Your team assembles what it needs on top and owns what it should own, your pricing architecture and your configurations. Bespoke pricing code carries a decay clock, and the maintenance lands on whoever commissioned it. The experts stay the offer.
Frequently asked questions
Bring the product you are building. A pricing expert replies.
Tell us what you productized, how it reaches clients today, and what you charge for it now. A pricing expert reads it and comes back with where the licensing, packaging, and pricing decisions sit for that product.
The Assessment is free, and the useful way to run it is on the product you are building rather than on the firm. You can also book a working session if a call is easier.