So when growth slows, the conversations change. Especially from your CRO.
When growth slows, the conversations change. Especially from your CRO.
You start to hear:
- A ton of talk about raising prices. A lot. There are good reasons to raise prices. You added a lot of value, the market moved, you were underpriced from day one. Missing the plan isn’t one of them. A price increase to cover a forecast gap gets you one good quarter and a base that now trusts you a little less.
- Pushing to delete low-end and free editions to force users and customers to pay more. The free and low-end tiers are where your next 1,000 customers come from. Kill them and the numbers look fine for a few quarters. Then the top of the funnel dries up and nobody can say why.
- Forcing customers to buy annual and multi-year contracts. This hides churn, but it only defers it. If smaller customers want to pay monthly and they’re happy, why force them otherwise? A customer locked into a 3-year deal they didn’t want isn’t retained. They’re just stuck, and they’ll tell everyone.
- Threatening to sue customers over autorenewals, nonpayment, etc. You’re really going to go sue a customer? Over an amount that is a rounding error for you and a real problem for them? Every one of these ends up in a Slack group, a Reddit thread, or a post on X.
- Hanging on to low performers. Recruiting gets harder when growth slows, so you start to hear a lot of excuses for underperforming management. “The market is tough.” “Give them one more quarter.” The low performers stay, the top performers notice, and the top performers leave first.
- Moving customer success into sales. Once CS carries a quota, every customer call becomes an upsell call. Then who will actually care about the customers?
Every one of these trades long-term trust for one quarter of numbers
None of it creates a single new customer. All of it extracts more from customers you already have. It’s the same play every time: the new logo engine sputters, so the company turns around and starts mining the base.
And it works, for a little while. NRR can look fine for a few quarters on price increases and forced upgrades alone. But you’re spending down goodwill you spent years building, and goodwill doesn’t show up on a board deck until it’s gone.
In 2026, your customers can leave faster than ever
This matters more now than it did even a year or two ago. Switching costs in B2B are falling fast. Your customers are evaluating AI-native alternatives every quarter. Some of them are building replacements themselves with a few agents and a vibe coding tool. We’re doing that ourselves at SaaStr right now, looking hard at which vendors we can replace when the pricing and contract terms start feeling punitive.
So when a vendor hits us with a surprise price increase, a forced multi-year term, or a new metering scheme, we don’t just grumble and pay anymore. We go look at what it would take to leave. And more and more often, the answer is “not that much.”
If you squeeze your base in this environment, you aren’t just risking churn in 2027. You’re handing your customers the exact reason they needed to go try the alternative.
The founders may be the only ones to fight here. That energy has to go into winning, into gaining market share, into getting back to growth. Not into getting more pain out of the base.
It’s gotten so bad, that even I’m a bit scared to buy any traditional SaaS product today. It’s all too much. I don’t want to sign up for years of this:
Even I’m a bit scared to buy traditional B2B software today
It’s gotten so bad that I’m a bit scared to buy almost any traditional software product today. It’s all too much. The auto-renewal clauses buried on page 11. The 90-day cancellation windows. The “we’re moving you to our new pricing” emails. The minimum seat counts. The rep who suddenly can’t do monthly anymore.
I don’t want to sign up for years of that. And neither do your customers.
The vendors I’m happy to keep paying are the ones who made it easy to start, kept making the product better, and never made me feel trapped. I pay them more every year, and I don’t mind, because I chose to.
Fight for your customers. Fight for the little guy. Fight for Free. Fight for The Future.
