Unlocking scalable growth
through smarter pricing.
BambooHR rebuilt their pricing architecture with SPP and grew ARR from $20M to $250M.
When BambooHR engaged SPP in 2017, they were stalled at ~$20M ARR. Discounting was running ahead of the deal desk, similar customers were paying wildly different amounts, and the team couldn’t enter the enterprise segment without a defensible pricing structure.
SPP rebuilt the licensing, packaging, and pricing architecture from BambooHR’s transaction data, deployed it through sales and the deal desk, and stayed to refine it in the field. Three years later, ARR had grown 750%. Today, BambooHR is approaching $250M and remains poised for IPO.
3 years.
for IPO.
unlocked.
Their original pricing model had been adapted from a similarly-sized project-management software company. As BambooHR scaled, management adjusted by intuition. Customer churn accelerated, acquisition slowed, and similar customers paid wildly different amounts.
They needed to stop the spiral.
What was breaking
at $20M ARR.
Discount
creep
Few guardrails on customer discount demands. Sales repeatedly escalated one-off deals to the deal desk, extending negotiations, slowing deal velocity, and eroding margins. Similar customers ended up paying very different prices.
No way to
forecast change
After prior pricing-model failures, the company needed an accurate way to forecast the impact of any new pricing adjustment on customers and the business, before shipping it. They didn’t have one.
Roadmap
outpacing pricing
BambooHR had an aggressive product roadmap and expansion plans. They needed an easy-to-understand pricing model that could absorb new product innovation and naturally encourage upsell and cross-sell, not block it.
Architecture, deployed
into the sales motion.
Transaction
data analysis
Comprehensive analysis of BambooHR’s customer base to understand how customers actually used and gained value from the software, not how the team thought they did.
Competitive
intelligence
Primary and secondary research into competitor pricing (including ethically-sourced contract price points, not website snapshots) to ground every decision in actual market data.
Packaging
rebuild
Collaboration with engineering, informed by the data and CI work, to redesign packaging so the new structure absorbed roadmap features rather than fighting them.
Scenario
simulation
Modeled the impact of every proposed pricing change against the actual customer base before launch. Increased confidence in the move and gave the team room to test, learn, and adjust through rollout.
Sales
enablement
Working alongside an implementation partner, SPP trained sales and deal-desk leadership on the new model and built compliance processes, including the will to walk away from deals that didn’t fit.
What changed
after rollout.
In 2017, BambooHR was at ~$20M ARR. By 2020, three years after SPP’s engagement, ARR had reached $150M. By 2023, revenues approached $250M and BambooHR remained poised for IPO.
Comprehensive
pricing strategy
The architecture reduced deal friction across the board and gave customers a clearer path to renew, upgrade, and expand. The team scaled the enterprise on the same foundation.
Faster deals,
better renewals
Applied across the entire sales organization, the new model raised deal velocity and improved rates of renewal, upgrade, and upsell, without manual deal-desk intervention.
Discount
discipline
Discounts now align to corporate strategy, not individual discretion. An algorithmic structure defines exactly how customers earn discounts as their spend increases.
Pricing
fairness
The new model removed opportunities to game the system. Customers in similar situations now pay similar amounts, fairness reinforced rather than eroded.
Enterprise
unlocked
BambooHR had originally avoided enterprise customers because they couldn’t manage profitable pricing at high utilization. After SPP’s engagement, they sell and close enterprise deals.
BambooHR: Why we hired Software Pricing Partners.
Hear Ryan Sanders, BambooHR Co-Founder, on choosing SPP — what made the decision land, what the partnership felt like, and why a customized approach beat the playbook firms in the room.
We wanted to do what we were doing with more certainty, with better science behind the process and a better understanding of what we mean when we’re dealing with our clients about pricing.
Kent Goates · former CFO, BambooHR
Other architectures
that survived.
OSIsoft
Acquired by AVEVA (Schneider Electric) for $5B. Pricing architecture survived PE-level diligence five years post-engagement.
BDNA
20% exit premium attributed to the pricing architecture. Two years post-engagement, Flexera acquired BDNA at a measurable revenue lift that went straight to enterprise value.
Nearmap
Aerial imagery SaaS rebuilt licensing and packaging for usage-based growth. Read the full architecture engagement.
Your pricing architecture should compound, not age on a shelf.
If your team is discounting without guardrails, losing deals they can’t explain, or stalling at a revenue plateau, that’s the conversation. Year by year, renewable. Each year is one we earn.