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“After seeing what Willingness to Pay has done for us, I’d recommend startups in the industry look at an investment in pricing the same way as they would look at an investment in organic traffic. Our revenue tripled in less than a year, and our ACV has changed drastically over time.” ‍

­– Viktor Heide, Co-Founder and Chief of Staff at Contractbook

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1. 200% increase in ARR within 12 months after implementation
2. 40x increase in ACV
3. 1000% increase in average price over time 
4. 30% faster sales cycles 
5. 150% increase in NDR

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About

Contractbook is a contract management platform that helps 10,000 businesses across 85 countries manage, track, and finalize contracts efficiently. It was founded by Viktor Heide, Jarek Owczarek, and Niels Martin Brøchner in 2017 and has raised $43.4M from leading VCs like Tiger Global and Bessemer Venture Partners. 

Situation: Unscalable pricing and packaging structure limited sales growth and future fundraising potential

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“We had one sales model, one pricing model, centering on one feature pack, which was not scalable. We wanted to capture the full value from our offering, but we didn’t know how and how much to charge.”‍

­– Viktor Heide, Co-Founder and Chief of Staff at Contractbook

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Contractbook served thousands of SMBs and enterprises and had just secured €3.5M in seed funding from investors like Gradient Ventures - Google’s AI Fund -  and byFounders. Their next step was to grow sales over the next 1-2 years to close a Series A funding round. However, their packaging and pricing model was not designed to support this ambitious goal.

At the time, Contractbook used a single per‑user pricing plan for solo customers and briefly tested a lower‑priced option to curb discounting. This led to a number of downstream issues that limited revenue and sales growth.

First, their sales cycle was too slow and costly. To set up the platform, customers first had to determine the right mix of user types (Admin, Pro, and Basic) based on their organization’s needs and use cases. This complex process discouraged some prospects from converting, restricting new sales growth. It also required significant support from Contractbook’s sales teams, which hurt unit economics.

Unit economics were further impacted by a lack of monetization for Contractbook’s contract automation capabilities. Some customers were paying for a single Admin User, yet they had full access to the platform’s API, using it with a Zapier setup to automatically process thousands of contracts every month. This limited opportunities for upsells and scalability, leading to lower retention rates in the long term.

Further, Contractbook’s pricing model didn’t offer a solution for SMBs wanting to buy fewer user licenses upfront and add more later based on usage. Most customers in that segment purchased fewer licenses, resulting in a low ACV of €228.The Contractbook team needed to design a packaging and pricing framework to grow ARR and ACV, increase retention, and support future scale.

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What we did - Tiered packaging structure with higher price points

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“We came out of our design sprint with something that everyone was wildly excited about. Willingness to Pay had helped us repackage our offering, increase our pricing, and transition existing customers through structured migration cycles.”

‍­– Viktor Heide, Co-Founder and Chief of Staff at Contractbook

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We led a design sprint with a core team of Contractbook’s C-suite executives - including the CEO, COO, and CPO -  to redesign their packaging and pricing model into a tiered framework that drives sales and revenue growth.

The new packaging and pricing model includes three tiers based on demand-centered use cases: Essential, Centralized, and Accelerated contract creation and management. Each plan offers increased functionality and additional user seats to encourage upsells and boost customer retention. Customers also have the option to try all Contractbook features for free over a 14-day period, prompting them to convert to a higher-value plan once their free trial expires.

Value-adds like Automations, API access, and User Provisioning are sold separately to ensure Contractbook’s features are monetized effectively.

The pricing framework is centered on price-per-user, using a set number of user licenses for each tier to minimize customer micro-optimization and unlock higher price points. This creates a workable solution for Contractbook’s sales team to close deals faster and boost ACV in the SMB segment.

When we re‑architect SaaS pricing, the metric that differentiates tiers is usually more important than the feature gating itself. In Contractbook’s case, price‑per‑user beat alternatives such as “contracts generated” or “storage consumed” because it: Mapped directly to perceived value (buyers intuitively link more users to more organizational benefit), it was easy to forecast (finance teams can model headcount growth) and it scales linearly with complexity (as teams add legal stakeholders, Contractbook’s workflow automation delivers disproportionate time savings, justifying higher revenue.

We sketched out a validation and implementation process to test the new packaging and pricing in live sales before a full-scale rollout, migrate legacy customers to the new scheme, and introduce it across new sales.

We met with Contractbook’s COO every other month during the validation and implementation process, providing hands-on support to the company’s sales, marketing, and product teams. We also introduced a clear structure that enables future price increases.

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Outcome: 1000% price increase

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“We saw immediate and substantial results after working with Willingness to Pay. Our new packaging and pricing structure allows us to sell more to the same market with a 1000% price increase and higher ACV. All of this accelerated our projected timeline for our Series A fundraising by 18 months.”

‍­– Viktor Heide, Co-Founder and Chief of Staff at Contractbook

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Here is a snapshot of the results that Contractbook has achieved through our partnership: 

1. 200% increase in ARR within 12 months after implementation

2. 40x increase in ACV

3. 1000% increase in average price over time 

4. 30% faster sales cycles 

5. 150% increase in NDR