I Priced a Treasury SaaS Product by Asking CFOs What They Pay Their Interns

At Finvestfx, we built a forex and treasury management platform for mid-market companies. The problem was simple: there was no Salesforce or HubSpot to reverse-engineer pricing from. No one was selling exactly what we were building.

Every pricing article I read told me to "anchor to value" or "price based on willingness to pay." Cool. But how do you figure that out when the customer doesn't know what this category of software should cost?

I tried the rational approach first. I looked at adjacent tools, finance SaaS platforms, workflow automation products. I made a spreadsheet. I felt very professional. And then I talked to a CFO who said, "I have no idea what this should cost. We've never bought anything like it."

That's when I realized the real comp wasn't other software. It was what they were already spending to solve the problem badly.

I stopped asking what they'd pay for the product and started asking what the pain was costing them

I talked to 8 CFOs and finance heads in our target segment (20-500 crore revenue companies). I didn't pitch. I just asked how they were handling forex exposure and treasury ops today.

Turns out, most of them had a junior finance person or an intern spending 10-15 hours a week on manual tracking, reconciliation, and reporting. Some were paying external consultants for quarterly reviews. A few had compliance issues from missed hedging windows.

One CFO told me, "We pay an intern ₹25k a month to do this, and they still mess it up half the time. If you can save me the headache, I'll pay more than that."

That became my pricing floor. Not what the software was worth in some abstract sense, but what they were already spending, plus the cost of errors and inefficiency.

For Finvestfx, that meant our entry plan started at ₹40k/month. Higher than intern costs, but justified by eliminating errors, saving senior finance team time, and reducing compliance risk. We weren't cheaper. We were *less expensive* when you counted the full cost.

I tested pricing by literally telling prospects the number and watching their face

I didn't run a conjoint analysis or a pricing survey. I just quoted different numbers to different prospects in discovery calls and paid attention.

Below ₹30k/month, people assumed it was a lightweight tool that wouldn't handle their complexity. Above ₹75k/month (for the base tier), they wanted enterprise features we didn't have yet.

₹40k felt right. It was high enough to signal seriousness but low enough that a finance head could approve it without a procurement circus. I literally adjusted based on whether people flinched, nodded, or asked "is that annual?"

This sounds unscientific, and it is. But when you have 20 enterprise prospects and no data, your pricing research *is* watching how people react when you say the number out loud.

I anchored upsells to incremental labor costs, not features

Once we had a base price, I needed to figure out our growth tier. Most SaaS pricing scales by users or volume. We didn't have clean proxies for that.

So I asked: what happens when their business grows? They hire another finance person, or they outsource more. Our pricing tiers mapped to headcount thresholds. If you're a ₹100 crore company, you probably have 2-3 finance people touching this workflow. If you're ₹300 crore, it's 5-6.

We priced the next tier at ₹80k/month and positioned it as "replaces what you'd spend on another finance hire." Not perfect, but it gave prospects a mental model.

Did we leave money on the table? Probably. But we also closed 12 clients in the first 6 months without a single pricing negotiation that dragged past one call. That mattered more than optimizing for max revenue per deal.

What I'd tell another PM pricing a category-creating product

1. Find the current cost, not the perceived value. Value is squishy when no one knows what this type of product costs. Current cost (labor, tools, errors, missed opportunity) is concrete.

2. Test pricing in real conversations, not surveys. You need to see the hesitation, the nod, the "wait, is that per user?" in real time.

3. Anchor your tiers to something customers already budget for. Headcount, consultant fees, compliance costs. Give them a mental shortcut.

4. Don't overthink it. You'll adjust pricing later. The goal is to pick something defensible enough to close deals and learn. I changed our pricing model twice in year one based on what we learned from actual customers.

Pricing a product with no comps feels like you're making it up. That's because you kind of are. But if you ground it in what the problem already costs them, you're not guessing. You're just reframing the budget conversation.