Pricing is the product decision that product managers are least comfortable making. They will spend weeks on discovery, months on roadmap strategy, and hours debating the colour of a button, but pricing is treated as a finance or sales concern that falls outside the product manager's domain. This abdication, Maarten Laruelle argues, is one of the most costly mistakes in SaaS product management.

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Maarten, a consultant at Sirris specialising in helping Belgian technology companies with their business strategies, delivered a talk that placed pricing at the centre of product strategy rather than at its periphery. Drawing from his work with dozens of Belgian SaaS companies, Maarten revealed how pricing decisions made early in a product's life create structural constraints that shape every subsequent product decision.

For the Francophone product community, where many companies are still in the early stages of professionalising their pricing approach, the talk was a wake-up call about a dimension of product management that deserves far more attention than it typically receives.

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Original Presentation Slides

Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.

Pricing Is Product Strategy

Maarten opens with a claim that surprises many in the audience: pricing is not a downstream consequence of product strategy. It is product strategy. The way you price your product determines which customers you attract, which features they value, how they evaluate your product against competitors, and what kind of company you build around it.

He illustrates this with a comparison of two Belgian SaaS companies in adjacent markets. One chose per-user pricing and attracted mid-market companies that carefully controlled their seat count. The other chose usage-based pricing and attracted companies that wanted to start small and scale. Both companies built excellent products, but their pricing models created fundamentally different customer bases, support requirements, and growth trajectories. Neither pricing model was wrong. But each one shaped every subsequent product decision in ways that could not easily be reversed.

“Your pricing model is not a label you attach to your product after you build it. It is a structural decision that determines what your product becomes. Change your pricing model and you change your customer, your roadmap, and your company.”

- Maarten Laruelle

Maarten argues that product managers must be active participants in pricing decisions, not passive recipients. They have the deepest understanding of customer value, feature differentiation, and usage patterns, all of which are essential inputs to pricing architecture. When pricing is delegated entirely to finance or sales, these inputs are missing, and the resulting pricing model often misaligns with the product's value delivery.

The Most Common Pricing Mistakes

Maarten draws from his consulting experience to identify the pricing mistakes he sees most frequently in Belgian and European SaaS companies. These are not theoretical errors. They are patterns he has observed repeatedly and that cause measurable damage to revenue and growth.

Pricing too low out of insecurity: many Belgian SaaS companies undercharge because they fear losing customers to competitors. Maarten shows that this often attracts price-sensitive customers who churn at higher rates and demand more support

Feature-gating without value logic: splitting features across pricing tiers based on development cost rather than customer value creates confusion and resentment when customers discover that a feature they need is in a higher tier for no reason they can understand

Ignoring willingness to pay research: most companies Maarten works with have never systematically studied what their customers are willing to pay, relying instead on competitor benchmarking or gut instinct

Delaying pricing changes: companies that know their pricing is wrong but postpone changes because they fear customer backlash end up in a worse position with each passing quarter as the gap between value delivered and price charged widens

warningThe cost of free tiers

Maarten dedicates special attention to free tiers, which are common in the Belgian SaaS landscape. He argues that a free tier is not free for the company. It creates support costs, infrastructure costs, and a conversion challenge. Unless the free tier serves a clear strategic purpose such as network effects or self-serve onboarding, it often becomes a drag on the business rather than a growth engine.

Pricing Experimentation for Product Teams

Maarten transitions from diagnosis to prescription by sharing how product teams can approach pricing experimentally rather than treating it as a fixed, high-stakes decision that can only be revisited annually.

The pricing experiment playbook

Maarten describes a Belgian B2B SaaS company that ran a pricing experiment by offering three different packaging structures to three cohorts of new customers over a single quarter. Cohort A received the existing pricing. Cohort B received simplified pricing with fewer tiers. Cohort C received value-based pricing tied to a specific usage metric. After ninety days, they measured conversion rates, average revenue per customer, and thirty-day retention. The results showed that Cohort C had lower initial conversion but significantly higher retention and revenue, leading to a permanent pricing restructure.

He acknowledges that pricing experiments are harder to run than feature experiments because pricing affects contracts, invoicing, and customer expectations. However, he argues that the learning value is proportionally higher. A single well-run pricing experiment can have more impact on revenue than a quarter's worth of feature development.

check_circleStart with new customer cohorts rather than existing customers to avoid the complexity of mid-contract pricing changes

check_circleTest packaging and value metric changes before testing price level changes, because the structure of pricing often matters more than the absolute numbers

check_circleMeasure retention and expansion revenue, not just initial conversion, to understand the full lifecycle impact of pricing changes

check_circleInvolve customer success in pricing experiments to capture qualitative feedback on how customers perceive and react to different pricing structures

Pricing Considerations for the Belgian SaaS Market

Maarten closes with observations specific to the Belgian and Walloon SaaS ecosystem. He notes that Belgian companies frequently benchmark their pricing against American competitors and then discount heavily, assuming that the European market will not bear American prices. He challenges this assumption with data showing that willingness to pay in the European B2B market is often comparable to the American market when the value proposition is clear.

He also addresses the multilingual challenge that Belgian SaaS companies face. Products that serve both Francophone and Dutch-speaking markets sometimes default to a single pricing structure that does not account for different market dynamics. Maarten suggests that localised pricing strategies, informed by market-specific willingness-to-pay research, can unlock revenue that uniform pricing leaves on the table.

lightbulbPrice is a signal

Maarten ends with a principle that he considers the most important lesson of his talk: price is not just a number on an invoice. It is a signal to the market about the value and seriousness of your product. Underpricing does not just leave revenue on the table. It communicates that your product is not valuable enough to command a premium. In a market where Belgian SaaS companies are competing with global players, this signal can be more damaging than any feature gap.

The Hidden Price Tag: Pricing Strategy

Original Presentation Slides

Pricing Is Product Strategy

The Most Common Pricing Mistakes

warningThe cost of free tiers

Pricing Experimentation for Product Teams

The pricing experiment playbook

Pricing Considerations for the Belgian SaaS Market

lightbulbPrice is a signal

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