Pricing model strategy

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---
title: "Pricing Model: How we price for the future of SaaS and AI"
source: notion
notion_id: "3122425b-f103-8044-8f8f-f085efd25122"
migrated: "2026-04-02"
status: active
tags: [strategy, pricing, business-model]
---

# Pricing Model: How we price for the future of SaaS and AI

EmpathyIQ shouldn't be priced like a typical SaaS research tool.

Most platforms charge per user or per feature. That model worked because research scaled with headcount. If a company wanted to do more research, they hired more people, and bought more seats.

That assumption is starting to break because of AI. With AI, smaller teams can now run more studies, more often, and with better output. So growth in research activity is no longer tied to growth in headcount.

This problem is not limited to research — it actually impacts the entire SaaS market. If revenue scales with seats, and seat growth slows down, then revenue growth slows down. That's why you're seeing pressure on SaaS valuations. The underlying model is being questioned.

So the question becomes: what do you scale pricing with instead?

The answer is value.

Pricing shouldn't be tied to how many people are using the tool. It should reflect:

- how much research is being done
- how reliable that research is
- how widely that knowledge is used across the business

From that perspective, we're not charging for access to tools. We're charging for access to a research system that is always on. A system that lets teams continuously conduct research the business can trust.

At its best, this becomes the system of record for customer understanding across the entire business — for Sales, Marketing, Insights, and Executive teams.

Every study, every insight, every piece of learning is captured and made accessible to every employee in the company.

Over time, it stops being "a tool the research team uses" and becomes infrastructure the business depends on.

This also creates a second axis of scale — we don't just scale with more research, but with more teams using the system to understand the customer.

If you bring in a new hire, whether that's in sales, marketing, or product, they shouldn't need weeks to get up to speed. They should be able to interact with the system and quickly understand what the business already knows.

That's where this becomes mission-critical software because the tool itself can outlast the research teams that buy it. The platform becomes a persistent system of truth. Not because it stores information, but because the research going into it is consistently validated and defensible.

That's the foundation the pricing model is built on.

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## How enterprise pricing works

EmpathyIQ pricing is structured across three dimensions:

- a platform subscription for the research OS
- usage that scales with research activity
- a confidence layer that ensures outputs are decision-ready

This means customers are not paying for seats or features.

They are paying for:

- the ability to run research properly
- the ability to capture and reuse knowledge
- and the ability to embed direct customer insights across the organisation

---

### A note on Confidence

The confidence layer — the system of checks that ensures research can be trusted — is not a premium add-on. It is present at every level of the platform.

What changes across tiers is the depth and scope of those checks:

- At every level, researchers get the Trust Centre (38+ quality metrics, question-level analysis, respondent review workflow), questionnaire review against best-practice principles, and pre-launch validation checklists.
- At higher levels, confidence capabilities expand to include cross-study corroboration during reporting, structured audit trails, organisational governance frameworks, and automated monitoring at scale.

Confidence is the core of what makes EmpathyIQ different. It should never be gated behind a tier. What scales is how deeply and broadly it's applied.

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## EmpathyIQ Pricing Levels

EmpathyIQ is structured in layers. Each level expands along three dimensions:

- how much research is being run
- how much knowledge is captured and structured
- how widely that knowledge is used across the business

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### Level 0: Point solution users

We will continue to offer point solutions on a per-seat basis. This is for smaller teams or individuals who want access to specific tools.

**What this is for:** driving adoption, increasing usage volume, validating individual tools.

**What they get:** access to individual tools (e.g. surveys, discussion forums).

**What they don't get:** no shared knowledge layer, no connection between tools, no cross-study querying or synthesis.

Each tool operates independently. If they want their research to connect, accumulate, and become reusable, they move to Level 1.

**Pricing: £220 per seat**

> **Upgrade path:** The team grows beyond 5 seats (at which point the platform subscription becomes more cost-effective), or they need research from different studies to be connected and queryable.

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### Level 1: Foundation — Research + Knowledge Core

**£1,500 – £3,000 / month**

This is the entry point for teams that want a connected system. At this level, all research conducted within EmpathyIQ becomes structured, stored, and reusable.

**What they get:**

*Research workflows* — Survey design and execution, discussion forums, and AI-moderated interviewing. Native integration with sample providers (Pure Spectrum and others) for respondent sourcing directly within the platform.

*Confidence layer (core)* — Trust Centre with 38+ quality metrics across all studies. Question-level speeding combined with pattern recognition. Respondent-level flagging and review workflow. Questionnaire review against best-practice principles. Pre-launch validation checklists. AI-assisted narrative review when building reports.

*Knowledge layer (core)* — Automatically stores all research run on the platform. Processes quantitative studies, discussion outputs, and generated reports. Makes past work searchable and reusable across studies.

*Light external ingestion* — Ability to upload and store external reports and presentations (PDFs and PPTs). These are indexed and searchable, but not deeply structured against the full metadata schema.

**Usage included:** ~x responses / month, ~x AI interviews / month, ~x documents ingested / month, ~x discussion forums / month.

**Core value:** replaces fragmented tools; ensures every study run is captured and reusable; starts building institutional knowledge from day one with confidence checks built into every project.

> **Upgrade path:** The team needs to bring in research that didn't originate in EmpathyIQ as fully structured, deeply queryable knowledge — not just stored files.

---

### Level 2: Growth — System of Record for Research

**£5,000 – £10,000 / month**

This is where EmpathyIQ becomes the system of record across all research, not just what is run on the platform.

**What changes from Level 1:**

*Full research ingestion* — Teams can create project structures for any methodology, including ones not natively supported. For each project, they can capture: briefs and objectives, discussion guides, transcripts and raw qualitative data, datasets from external tools, supporting materials.

*Structured knowledge layer* — All ingested research is structured, tagged, and mapped to a consistent schema. This allows it to sit alongside native studies and be queried in the same way. This is not file storage. It is a structured, queryable body of knowledge.

*Expanded confidence capabilities* — cross-study and cross-methodology synthesis; stronger retrieval across all research inputs; ability to connect insights across quant, qual, and external sources.

**Core value:** removes fragmentation across tools and methodologies; creates a single, structured source of truth for research; ensures no research is lost or forgotten; allows teams to build on everything that came before.

> **Upgrade path:** Research is no longer used by one insight team alone. Multiple departments — or multiple insight teams across markets — want direct access to customer knowledge.

---

### Level 3: Enterprise — Research Infrastructure

**£15,000 – £40,000+ / month**

This is where the platform becomes embedded across the organisation. It is no longer just used by the research team. It becomes the company's shared system for understanding customers.

**What changes from Level 2:**

*Organisation-wide access* — multiple teams can access and query insights (research, product, marketing, sales); role-based access and permissions; controlled visibility across projects and data; non-research users can ask questions of the knowledge base directly without relying on the insight team as an intermediary.

*Standardisation and governance* — consistent validation frameworks across teams and markets; audit trails and compliance; standardised ways of running and storing research across the organisation.

*Confidence layer at organisational scale* — All core confidence features, plus: structured traceability from conclusions back to source data across the full knowledge base; governance frameworks that ensure research quality standards are maintained as more teams contribute; automated monitoring across multiple concurrent studies.

*Early automation (direction of travel)* — assisted study setup; automated monitoring of live research; increased AI involvement in synthesis and reporting.

**Core value:** enterprise-wide access to customer understanding; consistent and reliable research across teams; reduced duplication of effort; reduced decision risk; the insight team maintains quality governance while the rest of the organisation benefits from what they produce — without the insight team becoming a bottleneck.

**Enterprise is not a fixed tier.** It expands based on: how much research is being run, how much data is being stored and structured, and how many teams rely on the system. Pricing increases in line with research throughput, knowledge volume, and organisational access.

---

### A note on respondent costs

Sample costs (the cost of sourcing respondents from panel providers) are passed through to the customer as a separate, transparent line item. EmpathyIQ's platform pricing covers the system — design, execution, quality control, knowledge management, and access. Respondent costs vary by audience, market, and methodology, and are managed within the platform but billed based on actual usage.

This keeps the platform pricing clean and predictable while giving customers full visibility into their total research costs.

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## The pricing logic, summarised

| Level | What you pay for | Confidence depth | Knowledge scope | Access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level 0 | Individual tools | Core (Trust Centre, QA, review) | None (standalone) | Individual |
| Level 1 | Connected research system | Core + report-level review | Native studies + light ingestion | Research team |
| Level 2 | System of record | Core + cross-study synthesis | Full ingestion + structured schema | Research team |
| Level 3 | Organisational infrastructure | Core + governance + traceability | Full knowledge base | Organisation-wide |

The confidence layer is always present. What scales is depth, scope, and organisational reach.