How 3 startups have successfully priced their customer-facing integrations 

Once companies perform the hard work of developing integrations for their product, they face another challenge soon after: deciding how to price them.

In theory, charging too high a price for each integration risks losing sales and low adoption from clients; while charging too little, or nothing at all, leaves money on the table and can make all the time that went into building these integrations seem like a wasted investment.

In reality, this decision is far more complex.

The “best” pricing strategy at your organization can be influenced by a variety of inputs, such as your business’ goals, the clients you serve, and how you build and maintain the integrations. And since the combination of these variables are unique to your organization, it isn’t in your best interest to simply copy what others do.

That said, seeing how other organizations navigate this exercise can help. So we’ll walk through how 3 startups—Causal, Apiday, and Avenue—thought through pricing their integrations.

Learn more about how you can price your integrations by watching the webinar, “Unlock your revenue: Selling your integrations.”

Providing integrations for “free”

Avenue, a smart ticketing platform for ops teams, made the decision to include all their integrations with their platform at no additional cost.

One of their reasons is simply that they want to help every ops team, regardless of their tech stack, integrate Avenue with the ticketing tools they use so that Avenue can support their core workflows. 

But there's also a financial factor that drove their decision. They’ve seen through experience that clients who adopt the integrations are more likely to be active users and use their platform in more meaningful ways. As a result, they have a higher propensity to renew. 

Caren Duane, Avenue’s Head of BizOps, sums up all of these points: 

“Every operations team works differently—even within a given organization—so we want to help everyone, regardless of the tools they use or the use cases they care about. Also, we’ve seen that our tool is stickier when it’s connected to more applications and supporting more workflows at a given company—so this decision also makes sense for us financially.”

Offering certain integrations for “free” while charging for others

Apiday, an environmental, social, and governance data platform, takes a similar approach to Avenue’s in that they also include the bulk of their integrations as part of their subscriptions. Their reasoning largely mirrors that of Apiday: they know that customers who adopt their integrations see more value from their platform and, in turn, have a higher likelihood of renewing.

However, they make an exception for integrations that fall outside the scope of what they’re able to provide through Merge. 

These integrations are fully executed by their team of developers. And as a result, they require more technical resources to implement and maintain. 

The add-on fees for these in-house integrations help offset their additional resourcing costs—at least to some extent.  

Including more integrations in higher-tiered plans and pricing specific integrations differently when purchased as add-ons 

Causal, a financial planning tool, lets customers access more integrations as they move to higher-priced subscriptions. For instance, clients can access one integration through their “Launch” plan and several through their higher-tier “Growth” plan.

Their rationale is that the opportunity to access more integrations can motivate prospects to pick Growth over Launch and encourage clients to move into Growth. Their larger clients (who’d typically pick their Growth plan) also generally need to access more integrations than smaller accounts, so this helps meet their integration needs.

On top of the integrations that come included in each plan, Causal lets clients add individual integrations à la carte. And they assign different prices to integrations from specific categories; integrations from categories that are typically most relevant to larger companies are more expensive. 

Lukas Köbis, Causal’s Co-Founder, briefly explains why they decided to adopt different prices for different integrations:

“Companies that use enterprise-grade accounting systems, like Netsuite, for instance, are often larger and have bigger budgets than, say, those that solely need HRIS integrations.”

Need support with building and pricing your integrations? Merge can help

Merge offers a single API that lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product across key software categories—all but ensuring that you’re able to provide the integrations your clients and prospects need, quickly. 

Merge’s team of integration experts can also help you build out your go-to-market integration strategy so that you can navigate critical decisions, like pricing, successfully.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.