Shredding The Indie Pricing Model

Why We Tore Up the Playbook: A Long-Term Agency-First Approach to Value

Earlier in August, we made a significant change to the way Blutui is priced. The reason is straightforward: we believe our commercial model should work a lot harder for those independent agencies we serve.

That might sound like an unremarkable statement, but in an industry increasingly focused on recurring revenue, expansion rates and quarterly growth, it is a deliberate choice. We are fortunate that we do not have Wall Street breathing down our necks, or analysts waiting for the next earnings call to ask why we prioritised the long-term economics of our agency partners over squeezing another percentage point out of this quarter.

We are free to make the decisions we believe are right.

Perhaps that is one of the advantages of being built by agency people, for agency people.

We understand agency economics

Blutui came out of an agency. We understand what happens when a client asks for yet another revision on a project that’s already underwater, when a website takes twice as long to build as expected, or when an agency is trying to protect its margin while keeping clients happy. We know the juggle, the spinning plates, the charged conversations.

We also understand that technology is only valuable to an agency if it improves the business. It needs to help an agency win work, deliver work, protect margin, move faster, differentiate itself and build stronger client relationships.

That is the lens through which we have reconsidered Blutui pricing.

The conventional SaaS model is often built around increasing revenue as users become increasingly dependent on the platform. More users, more features, more usage and progressively more ways to monetise the relationship.

We’ve lived life on the agency side and know this ain’t the right model for us.

Blutui becomes more valuable as an agency uses it across more of its client work. When an agency grows, wins more work and delivers more projects through Blutui, we benefit because the agency is winning. Our commercial model should therefore encourage that organic growth rather than progressively taking a larger share of the value the agency is creating. It needs to be a ‘no-brainier’ for agencies to embrace Blutui as a technology partner for growth.

We listened to agencies

The pricing change has come from listening to the agencies using Blutui, the agencies currently considering it and those persisting with other technologies to deliver websites and digital experiences.

We looked closely at agency economics and at how existing platforms charge for access, users, features, projects and usage. What became clear was that there was an opportunity to make Blutui considerably simpler and more closely aligned with how agencies actually operate.

The result is a pricing architecture designed around agency production rather than maximising software extraction.

We want agencies to see what Blutui costs, what they can charge their clients, and how much margin they can make, without needing a spreadsheet, a post-doctorate in maths, or the finance department every time they answer an RFP.

More importantly, we want the economics to encourage agencies to put more work through the platform.

The value should stay with the agency

The value of Blutui is not the subscription itself. It is what an agency can do within their agency ecosystem.

If a conventional website project takes a development team dozens of hours and Blutui can dramatically reduce that production effort, the resulting economic opportunity should belong first to the agency.

That productivity can become margin, additional projects, faster delivery, better work and the ability to compete for projects that previously would not have been commercially viable. The relationship between Blutui and our agency subscribers quickly becomes reputation enhancing as the agency improves every aspect of their digital project delivery.

It can also allow an independent agency to achieve some of the production economics of a much larger organisation without having to carry the same overhead.

That is the value we want to help create. We do not need to capture all of it.

We want the agency to benefit from it.

Existing agencies should benefit too

We have also deliberately avoided one of the more familiar SaaS practices: giving new customers the best deal while existing customers continue paying the old price.

If we believe we have created a better commercial model for agencies, then the agencies that already trust Blutui should benefit from it as well.

The agencies that got us here should not have to threaten to leave before being offered the pricing we are prepared to offer someone signing up tomorrow.

That is not the kind of relationship we want to build.

Independence gives us a longer view

Our independence gives us some freedom here.

We are building Blutui to become a significant global technology company, with ambitions well beyond New Zealand and beyond the agency that originally created it. But we are not building the business around the demands of a public market.

There is no quarterly earnings call where we need to explain why making Blutui more accessible to agencies might be better for the long-term business than maximising this quarter’s revenue.

That does not mean we are not serious about commercial performance. We are. A technology company needs to build a strong, sustainable and profitable business.

But there is a meaningful difference between building a valuable company and optimising every decision for the next reporting period.

We would rather build something that agencies genuinely value and want to grow with.

Because we are agency people

Ultimately, there is a simple reason behind all of this. We are agency people.

We understand the pressure agencies are under to do more with less. We understand that margin and cash flow matter. We understand that technology can either become a competitive advantage or simply another monthly invoice.

Most importantly, we understand that agencies succeed by creating value for their clients.

That is the ecosystem Blutui exists within.

If we make agencies more productive, more profitable and more capable, then Blutui has a reason to exist. If we become another software company looking for increasingly inventive ways to extract money from agencies, we have missed the point.

A longer-term relationship

Our pricing change is therefore more than a change to a price list. It reflects the kind of relationship we want to have with the agencies building their businesses on Blutui.

We want the economics to work for both sides. We want agencies to have room to make money. We want the platform to become more valuable as agencies become more successful. And we want our commercial model to remove barriers to adoption rather than create them.

There is a certain irony in a technology company deliberately making its pricing more agency-friendly at a time when much of the technology industry is moving in the opposite direction.

But we are fortunate not to have Wall Street telling us what to do, we have agencies.

And because Blutui was born from an agency, built by agency folk and exists to help agencies build better businesses, listening to them seems like a pretty sensible place to start.

The ambition is not to extract as much revenue as possible from every agency. It is to create enough economic value for agencies that growing alongside them becomes the business model.

That is the longer game we are here to play.