How we reached to the idea of Flexprice

One day, I got a call from Manish, who was working at Aftershoot (An AI Culling & Editing Software for Professional Photographers) at the time. They were planning to expand into multiple countries, and he mentioned they were spending sleepless nights trying to support localized pricing. They wanted to offer a 20% discount in new regions as part of their expansion plan, but their billing system was proving to be a major roadblock.

Coming from a D2C background, my first thought was, Why is this so complicated? Changing $15 to ₹1200 or adding a 20% discount sounded like a simple tweak. After all, tweaking prices on Shopify or other e-commerce platforms is usually straightforward. I even joked that maybe you are doing something wrong if this was such a big problem. Surely, in 20 years of SaaS, someone must have figured out a solution, right?

But the way Manish described the challenge made me pause. If a seasoned product leader like him was losing sleep over this, there had to be more to it. Curious, I went down the rabbit hole, diving into Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, and developer forums. What I found surprised me:

• Endless discussions about the complexities of managing pricing in SaaS

• Companies struggling to localize pricing, switch customers from monthly to annual plans,

• Some early threads mentioning about months of effort of building usage-based pricing

• Complaints about the lack of flexible tools for handling these critical pricing decisions

Few threads which I discovered:

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kyle-poyar_saas-pricing-startup-activity-7126259239517343744-lPrZ/

  

  
  

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176630395738750976/

  

  
  

• https://www.reddit.com/r/stripe/comments/1b72mvg/upgrading_a_subscription_with_stripe/

  

  
  

• https://www.reddit.com/r/stripe/comments/197sy1x/how_in_the_world_do_i_manage_upgradingdowngrading/

  

  
  

• https://www.reddit.com/r/stripe/comments/1051ghh/massswitch_clients_from_monthly_to_annual_payments/

  

  
  

• https://www.reddit.com/r/stripe/comments/re0c82/is_it_possible_to_have_a_different_price/

  

  
  

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176238730003795968/

  

  
  

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176903592539213825/

  

  
  

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7175971103771619328/

  

  
  

I was shocked to see these threads and soon I realised, yes this is a problem. I realized that SaaS companies face unique pricing challenges as they scale, especially as they expand globally or introduce AI-driven features. The complexity grows exponentially, affecting multiple departments (sales, marketing, finance) and requiring significant engineering resources to keep everything in sync.

So, I called Nikhil and described about this problem statement. Surprisingly, Nikhil was also dealing with similar challenges at WizCommerce (an all-in-one AI-powered platform that empowers B2B wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers digitize their end-to-end sales) . They were trying to transition to usage-based billing, and he explained the pain of building custom logic on top of traditional billing tools and how difficult it is for a developer to spend weeks in building a logic which evolves overtime and that too is not part of their core product.

This was the point where journey of Flexprice started for three of us. It brought together the perspectives of a product manager, who understands the business requirements, and a tech lead, who knows the pain of building these systems from scratch. It’s the developers who end up building these custom billing workflows, managing edge cases, and constantly firefighting when pricing logic breaks.

Early validation

Once the idea started forming, we needed to validate it. We spoke with over 100 companies, from fast-growing startups to enterprise teams, and the feedback was consistent:

• Billing complexity is a major pain point: As companies scale, managing pricing isn't just about changing numbers in a database. It involves coordinating marketing, sales, finance, and product teams, each with their own needs and constraints.
  
  

• Legacy tools fall short: Most existing billing platforms were built for the old, seat-based SaaS world. They weren’t designed to handle the unique challenges of AI, infrastructure, and usage-based models, where costs can vary dramatically based on usage.
  
  

• Developers are stuck: In every company we spoke to, it was the developers who felt the pain the most. They were stuck building custom scripts, managing complex billing logic, and constantly firefighting issues as pricing evolved.
  
  

• AI is making this problem worse: With the rise of AI and infrastructure platforms, companies are experimenting with new pricing models that don’t fit into the rigid templates of traditional billing systems. This creates a constant need for customization, which becomes a maintenance nightmare.

The realization

That’s when we realized this wasn’t just a product gap, but an infrastructure gap. The industry needed a billing solution that was flexible, open, and developer-first. Something that allowed companies to iterate quickly, without being locked into a rigid vendor stack.

That’s when Flexprice started to take shape. We're building an open-source metering and billing platform that helps monetize AI and agentic companies to monetize their products. Our aim is to give developers the freedom to build unique pricing models without the pain of vendor lock-in.