Constanci on adapting pricing models to a changing marketplace

Constanci streamlines billing and revenue management for midmarket to large companies like GAdventures, Vanta, and NCR. Founded in 2021, the startup simplifies billing and revenue operations on both Stripe and Salesforce platforms.

We spoke with Dushyant Pandya, cofounder of Constanci, about AI in billing and revenue management, experimenting with pricing models, and collaborating with Stripe’s finance automation products.

Products used

    Billing
    Tax
    Revenue Recognition
    Partner Ecosystem
North America
Startup

What inspired you to cofound Constanci?

With 15 years of experience in the SaaS and subscription industry, my cofounder and I sold a business to Brillio, a Bain Capital company. As we were figuring out what to do next, we saw an opportunity to continue improving commerce and customer engagement, leading us to launch Constanci.

Having worked with Salesforce as an employee and partner, we adopted their mantra of “no red account.” As our focus became friction-free customer relationship and commerce management, we chose to partner with Stripe, a finance platform that shares a similar user-first mentality.

What is your team focused on these days?

We’re heavily focused on helping businesses streamline SaaS revenue management in areas like subscriptions, recurring revenue, and billing. We help companies identify and test pricing strategies, which includes price experimentations and pricing methods, so our customers can experiment and pivot quickly.

What are the biggest challenges companies face today when it comes to billing and revenue management?

Early or midstage companies often start with simple pricing models which can make it challenging to incorporate different pricing methods after an initial success in the marketplace.

Legacy enterprises with more mature go-to-market and sales models want agility with changing market conditions. They need to align their newer, lower-priced products and online revenue models with sales-led enterprise offerings as customer needs evolve. Constanci can help a company experiment with new revenue models that directly impact their revenue and bottom line.

How will SaaS change over the next 5–10 years with AI?

Many more pricing models will be created. When I started at Salesforce in the mid-2000s, SaaS products were offered on a per-seat basis and primarily as annual plans—we didn’t have monthly models or usage-based pricing.

Now, so many tools enable companies to measure usage and meter consumption that it’s easier to customize pricing around the business’s specific needs. AI will automate how companies analyze a customer’s product usage, competitor pricing, industry trends, and recommend customer feature bundles and pricing upgrades to best fit the user's needs. This is a win for both the customer and service providers.

What are some of Constanci’s priorities over the next few years—what’s on your radar and what do you hope to accomplish?

We want to remove silos within an organization that can emerge when sales, finance, or marketing operations have applications that do not work well together. Synchronizing department tools to ensure they’re optimized throughout the organization for revenue operations and customer engagement will create more efficiencies, grow revenue, and deliver a big customer impact.

What does the typical Constanci user look like?

Constanci works with fast-growing startups, medium businesses, and divisions or larger enterprises. These companies are typically mission-oriented and have a clear vision of growth with new product and pricing models, and go-to-market strategies.

For most of our users, we start by automating their customer acquisition with direct sales from ecommerce stores. We then automate their revenue operations with Stripe’s revenue and finance automation product suite, including Billing, Tax, and Revenue Recognition. As these newly acquired users grow, we seamlessly enable the upgrade path in Salesforce CRM. These users partner with us to scale their revenue operations by managing the entire subscription lifecycle in their customer journey.

Are there any interesting or unique ways you’ve seen enterprises use your products and solutions to experiment with new products and pricing models?

One example is when a user wanted to offer a bundled product with monthly, quarterly, and yearly pricing. Without configure, price, and quote (CPG) functionality, the business needed to create multiple product SKUs, leading to complex reporting and high-coordination for revenue operations.

We believed there was a simpler way to achieve this with Stripe and Salesforce. Our solution allows a customer’s salesforce to offer multiple pricing and billing frequencies, without SKU explosion and revenue operations automation through Stripe Billing. Sales teams can then offer pricing and billing options to meet the customer’s preference and enter longer-term contracts once the customer realizes the value.

Can you explain how Constanci works with Stripe?

We’re building solutions on top of Stripe revenue and finance automation products like Stripe Billing, Revenue Recognition, and Stripe Tax. Our expertise combined with Stripe enables companies to more quickly integrate these products into their infrastructure.

While Stripe is known as a payments infrastructure, we’ve been thrilled to support its evolution on powering revenue and finance automation.

How does Stripe enable Constanci to successfully conduct business?

At our core, we love to experiment with new technologies and the easiest way to accomplish that is through billing products that work as easily as Stripe. Stripe’s products are reliable and high-performing.

From a cultural perspective, Stripe brings positive energy to our partnership and collaborates by working as one team with transparency. We also work closely with Stripe’s product team to learn and implement new features, allowing for a deeper understanding of Stripe’s roadmap.

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