By Author: CA Shailendra Marathe
Chartered Accountant | MBA (IIM Bangalore) | 30+ years in finance & pricing advisory
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Who This Book Is For
This book is written for you if you are
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A SaaS / AI founder struggling to price beyond “market benchmarks”
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A CXO who senses pricing is hurting margins but can’t pinpoint where
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A product leader making roadmap decisions without pricing economics
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A consultant or finance leader advising growth-stage businesses
This book is NOT for you if you are looking for
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Generic pricing formulas that do not work in your business context
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Discount tactics or sales hacks that are aimed at quick sales
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Theory without rigorous application of frameworks and numbers
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Short-term growth in revenue through customer acquisition
What Makes This Book Different
What you’ll learn
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Why pricing impacts profit more than cost reduction or volume growth
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How pricing decisions quietly shape strategy, positioning, and cash flows
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When premium pricing destroys value and when it creates moats
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How to design pricing variants without confusing customers
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How founders misread “what the market will pay”
What you won’t get
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No Silicon Valley SaaS clichés that sound repetitive
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No grounding in current Indian SaaS reality
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No insights into valuation metrics and VC playbook
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No “just test and iterate” hand-waving
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No spreadsheet gymnastics without context
Reviews
Founder
Healthcare SaaS
Finally, a pricing book written for SaaS founders who build with code, not spreadsheets. The unit economics, segmentation logic, and AI-specific pricing challenges are discussed rigorously. It forces you to think about pricing as an algorithm, not a guess. Serious, analytical, and highly practical.
Chief Revenue Officer
Logistics SaaS
This book is not about discounts or “what competitors charge.” It breaks down pricing for AI-SaaS products from first principles: cost structures, value metrics, usage volatility, and margin architecture. The math is transparent. If you’re building recurring revenue, this book sharpens your thinking.
Partner
Venture Capital Fund
What stood out is the depth. Instead of generic frameworks, it tackles real founder problems: usage-based pricing, expansion revenue, CAC recovery, and long-term pricing power. It reads like it was written by someone who understands both finance and product. Dense, but worth the effort.
Chief Finance Officer
EdTech SaaS
Most founders underthink pricing until fundraising or churn hits. This book treats pricing as a system design problem. The connection between growth, profitability, and positioning is laid out with clarity and numbers. If you’re scaling AI or SaaS in India, this is essential reading.
Highlights of the Book
Industry Data
Founder-grade AI-SaaS industry data on Indian SaaS Benchmarks, AI Costs 2026, Sector Specific Compliance Costs and Features and Pricing of Industry-Leading Pricing Management Platforms
Checklists
Ready to-use Checklists for Indian AI-SaaS founders for building AI Cost-to-Price Bridge, Pricing Intelligence, Assessing Internal Readiness, Successful Enterprise Negotiations, and Pricing Audit.
Visuals
Illustrations for ease of understanding of SaaS AI Margin Waterfall, the AI Cost Curve, Layers of Intelligence, Pricing Risk Distribution, Pricing Leakage, Pricing Drift, Model Arbitrage, and Build vs Buy Decisions.
Case Studies
Over 25 case studies derived from real-world Indian SaaS cases, across industries such as HealthTech, EdTech, HR Tech, FinTech, Quick Commerce, Analytics, Logistics, Compliance and Risk.
Pricing Framework
"The goal of an effective pricing strategy is to build a framework that can adapt with cost, value and growth" - Stripe, Global Payments & Revenue Management Platform