DANIEL LEDFORD: Hi, everyone. I’m Daniel. I’m on Stripe’s professional services team, and I talk to SaaS platforms every day about embedding payments into their software. In those conversations, I talk to platforms with a range of experience in pricing, from underpricing and leaving money on the table, to overpricing and losing deals to competitors. But today, I’m giving you a framework to make sure your business lands in that just right middle of that spectrum. Many platforms approach pricing like a checklist: pick a rate, add a markup, done. But a real pricing strategy has more moving parts: your costs, your revenue goals, your competitive position, but, most importantly, your platform’s unique business context. So whether you’re just starting to embed payments or you’ve been doing it for years, my goal today is simple: to give you a clear, actionable framework to help you maximize payments revenue for your platform.

And I’m not doing this alone. Joris, who’s head of payments at GoodLeap, will join us later to walk through how he navigated all this from scratch.

So here’s the thing about pricing payments. A lot of you in the room probably are resonating with the title of this slide, why it feels hard. There’s a lot of variables, and they all interact with each other. You change one thing, and everything else shifts. And that’s what makes this hard. But it’s also what makes it worth getting right. So let’s get into those variables now. Your costs. So interchange costs can vary. Card mix can change your costs overnight, and that’s real money on the table. Your business: are you optimizing for attach rate or take rate? Margin or market share? Your customers: are you servicing maybe enterprise customers versus SMBs, or do you have a mix, and you have to know that, and you have to make those strategy decisions based on that mix? And finally, the most volatile: our market. Say your competitor just dropped their pricing by 20 basis points. What do you do? Do you hold firm? Do you make a change? Something else?

So the question is: how do you build a pricing strategy that drives revenue, but stays flexible enough to adapt when the market moves? And it will move, guaranteed. Because here’s the thing—every month you wait to get this right is revenue you’re not capturing. Or worse, it could be deals you’re losing to competitors who’ve already figured this out.

That’s where our payments pricing framework comes in. It’s a practical playbook with built-in levers to adjust when new challenges show up. Over the next few minutes, we’ll walk through the core four stages: research and benchmark, target, launch, last, feedback and iterate, stage four. And think of this as a loop. So this is not a “one and done” thing. And you’ll always be in one of these stages. They often overlap, and each pass sharpens your approach. Now let’s dive in.

Stage one: research and benchmark. First, get comfortable with the payments landscape. So that slide I showed earlier where all those variables, understand what all of those are and what they mean for your business. Research what makes up payments, how pricing works, what drives costs. Again, those variable rates versus fixed fees, network costs, and where you have margin to work with.

You need to know your market. So what are the pricing norms in your space, and where would your price sit compared to those norms? For example, if you put a nonprofit platform and an ecommerce platform side by side, those price points are very different. You also need to look at your competitors. Are they offering payments? How do they price it? What levers or incentives are they using, and how do they go to market?

Talk to your customers. I think we all know this, but customers can give you the greatest feedback. So if any of those customers have recently left competitors, ask them why they left. Was it because of pricing? Don’t repeat the same mistakes that push them away from those competitors. And this can take many forms, but even running simple research sessions with those customers gives you that specific data set to use when you go into your pricing strategy talks. And this stage comes first because it’s honestly the most important. If you get stuck at any point along this journey, come back here and follow these three points.

Stage two: target. So you start by gathering your stakeholders, and that’s bringing together the right people. And that might look unique to your org of who that is, but make it clear this is a company-wide effort, right? It’s not just a payments team thing. Everyone should be looped in. Everyone should have a seat at the table. I’ve seen platforms be most successful when you have buy-in all the way up to the founders and CEO, and you treat payments as a company metric. Again, it’s not just a payments team thing. Invite decision-makers and a few healthy skeptics—they’re good to have at the table too—from finance, product, go-to-market, and support.

Next, you need to define your target. So kick off with a margin goal. Let’s say something like “50 basis points.” Start there. Or even a revenue milestone: “X amount of dollars in the first year.” Start there, and have the conversation, see where that takes you. And talk through how the application of that, a take rate, an attach rate, will help you get to that goal. And decide how you’ll measure success. So that target in the previous step, it needs to be measurable. You need to come back to that over time and see how you’re tracking against it. So if you’re targeting margin, let’s say a good starting point is: “Payments revenue minus payments cost.” And then add on any platform-specific rules or maybe accounting requirements that you need to on top of that. And the goal here is to walk away with a clear target and stakeholder buy-in so you and your cross-functional teammates stay accountable.

Step three: launch stage. So now you’re going to market, but you need to ramp your organization first. So you roadshow your strategy, and this is where you train your teams, preview the new offering, and gather feedback. This is also a feedback stage. So make sure you hit the three big customer-facing groups—this is usually sales, marketing, support—and use your support team as leverage here. They hear from customers in real time, and that’s gold when you’re refining messaging about pricing. Even better, roadshow your strategy at a company all hands meeting. Have everyone hear at the same time and sort of get that momentum.

Plan for every channel and every interaction. So think about where will questions about payments pricing come up, and are those teams equipped to help? Again, this is back to roadshowing your strategy, making sure everyone is on the same page. And remember, when you do these launches, they get easier each time. So the first one might be your initial payments offering. This is like a really big launch, right? High stakes. But you’ll do lower stake launches after that. You’re adding new payment methods, you’re making tweaks to your current pricing. So those follow-ups are less risky but can really boost your margins. So those are just as important.

Feedback and iterate. This is our last stage in the framework. So it’s your steady state that your platform sits in until something pushes you back to an earlier stage. So remember that. So first, review the performance. Going back to that measurable target that we talked about at the beginning, this is where you look at that again, talk to your stakeholders, and see if it still makes sense. And that’s the most important part here. So does that original target make sense? Should you adjust it? Should you segment it by cohorts? How should you handle it? And you’ll level up as you learn and as your payments business grows.

So you also need to keep the feedback flowing. So we’ve been doing feedback throughout the framework here. But make sure you have regular loops to hear from sales, support, any customer-facing teams so you’re always hearing what the market wants and what your customers are asking for. And lastly, be ready to update. So this is about being prepared when you inevitably need to do an update—and you will have to do an update at some point. So agree on a cadence for pricing changes, right? A good rule of thumb is to schedule a biannual pricing change release. You might do this later in the journey, but it’s a good place to start at the outset. And also decide how you’ll announce those updates. So this is just as important as the update itself, is how you’re announcing it, where you’re announcing it. So is it in-app, email, face-to-face with CSMs or your sales team? Updates should feel intentional and coordinated.

And that’s the loop: research, target, launch, iterate. Every pass gets sharper. Every cycle captures more revenue. Now, let’s talk to Joris about how he built payments pricing strategy at GoodLeap from scratch—no playbook, no precedent. So let’s hear what he learned.

JORIS VAN MENS: Great to be here.

DANIEL LEDFORD: All right. Welcome, Joris.

JORIS VAN MENS: Thanks so much.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Glad to have you here. Yeah. Can you quickly introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit more about GoodLeap?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah. My name’s Joris. I lead the payments business unit at GoodLeap. We’re a company that does solutions for the sustainable home improvement space. So think about solar and batteries, but also windowing, heating, and air conditioning. And then we provide financing and software both for contractors as well as for the homeowners themselves.

DANIEL LEDFORD: All right. So I just went through the framework. So think back, start at the beginning. When GoodLeap was deciding to build out your payments product, where did you start?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah. By the way, this is the first time I’m seeing the framework. It’s great to see it. It’s a good framework. And I think we’re somewhat closely aligned to it, but lots to learn also. So we started with a lot of humility, really. We have a lot of people from different payment companies at our company, but nobody had really done platform payments yet as we’re doing right now. So there was a lot to learn. First thing we did was a lot of research with our contractor base. So we sent out surveys, we did external market research. The second thing we did was we really dug into what does the cost structure look like for a payment? Thinking about, hey, what’s the processing fees, the network assessments, the interchange, how does it work with different payment mixes? The cards are not the only payment method, looking at other payment methods as well. So really educating ourselves around the cost of a payment.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And we talked about competitors earlier. So was that a part of your process? Did you look at competitors, and who was offering payments?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We looked at the competitors. I wouldn’t say we have a perfect single competitor. Everybody does something slightly different, but we looked at other players in the space. What we found is quite a few offer payments as well. A bunch of them offered it just to have the functionality, but what you can also see quite often is that they use it really as a revenue line. And that means they priced quite highly to be able to make a lot of margin there. So for us, it was an insight like, okay, there’s a lot of margin there. And perhaps when we start entering the market, we can price a bit more competitively as an early stage differentiator in the market.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And so you’ve mentioned contractors, and GoodLeap sits in quite a specific vertical. And so you talk to your contractors a lot. What did you learn from them about pricing?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, a lot. Yeah. We talked to our contractors a lot directly. A lot of folks from my company are sitting here. They know we went to San Diego recently to shadow a number of contractors. One thing that we know that we see is that they don’t really know their pricing very well. Some say like, “Hey, we pay 3% flat fee on cards.” Then you look at their statement, and it’s a lot more nuanced. They often pay more than they think they’re paying. So they don’t really know their own pricing very well. Another thing about our space is that the ticket prices are super high. So when you think about when you have a big house, and you’re putting solar and battery and heating, you’re replacing all of it, easy to have like an $80,000 ticket or something. So the median ticket price for us is many thousands of dollars.

That’s not your average retail, not your average SaaS. So that is an important consideration, and contractors that are coming on our platform, and they want to make sure that they can immediately take these very high-transaction payments. One other thing I would say is it’s pretty typical for payments platforms to ask for reserves. Now, the contracting space is a very cash-strapped space. These contractors, they go out, they buy a lot of material, they have to pay for subcontractors. A lot of that’s before they actually receive a payment, so they’re constantly fronting money. So if, then, a payments platform comes to them and say like, “Hey, please deposit $20,000 to be able to take payments,” that’s a no-go for them. So yeah, reserves, that was another big topic that we heard from them.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. Yeah. And those are great carrots when you kind of are talking to contractors of like, “We’re not setting a reserve,” or you have some things you’ve learned, right? So you have all these great data points, right? So how did you go from sort of discovery mode, talking to contractors, to actually creating your pricing strategy?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, I would say there were two things really based on that, that we set for our pricing strategy. One was we wanted to make sure that pricing really integrated well within the larger offering that we had. So it has to work really well with our software, but also down the line, with the software of the contractor that we work with. Some of them have homegrown CRMs, it just needs to fit the workflows really well. So kind of that embedding with our financing, with our software, with the outside software, that was really important. I would say second, as I already hinted at, pricing a little bit more competitively, because in these early stages when we had a fledgling product, there was definitely a differentiator that we could lean into.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And that’s, I guess, framing you need when you start thinking about your revenue goals. So how were you talking about what success looked like from a financial point of view?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, there was a big push and pull with C-level leadership. There were pretty high margin expectations from us out the door. I’m not sure how realistic they were. As we went into the market, one thing we noticed is that the payments mix that we saw was a little less favorable to us than what we had forecasted. So for example, we saw more card-not-present, whereas we had really banked on card-present as the primary type of pay, as the primary payment method. We saw more premium cards, we saw a bit more ACH than we anticipated. So that quickly also made us establish like, “Hey, is this really the right thing to be shooting for these high margins out the door?” Because we could achieve them, right? It’s possible, but then your pricing goes up and up and up.

And so, through a lot of conversations with—and I pushed this really hard actually—through a lot of conversations, we kind of reframed it and to say, “Let’s really push on volume right now. Sure, we have decent margins, but volume is the primary goal, and we are growing very, very fast. And we know that we have a number of levers that we can use down the line to improve our margins as well.”

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And we’ve talked about costs, but when you were talking about costs with stakeholders, was that sort of just the cost of payments themselves, like processing fees, or was it like a broader conversation?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah. So I mean, there’s many parts to cost. Somebody in my company made this comparison to say like, “Hey, there’s the cost of building a restaurant and the cost of running a restaurant.” We were eating at a restaurant at a time, so apt comparison. So there’s the building part, right? You need to build your software, you need to build your risk infrastructure, there’s the marketing assets to produce, et cetera. So there’s a lot of—not even just upfront, but just this first year, first two years—there’s a lot of costs that you need to take on to set up your payment product. So that’s kind of the building part. And then there’s the running part, which to your point, there’s the transacting costs, the processing costs, network fees, et cetera. But there’s also your operating costs like support, your risk operations, all those other pieces.

One thing that we’re seeing is that, in that operational part, so our business is growing fast, our payments business is growing really fast, but the support costs and the operational costs that we have, they’re not growing, which is really good. In fact, I would say they’re probably declining as an overall cost picture. And it’s primarily due to AI. We’re able to leverage AI more and more in different places. Our risk infrastructure is really heavily AI-based, which I’m really proud of, was really fun to build that from scratch. And on the operational side also, there’s more and more that we can lean into AI. So even though our volumes are going up, our operational costs are going down, not just on a per-unit basis, but actual costs are going down.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And I love your restaurant analogy. That’s like very appropriate, I think, for this scenario. So I have to ask, do you prefer front of house or back of house when “running a restaurant?”

JORIS VAN MENS: I’ve never actually run a restaurant. I used to work front of house, actually, at a restaurant, as a student. But I mean, both are, I think, critical and super interesting. To me, the building part, I come from a product background, I love the building part, in particular. And this is also such a fun time to build because with AI, your building goes faster and faster. There’s so much you can do. You can also just design your product from the ground up with AI as a core component to it. So super fun time to build right now.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. Yeah. Okay so, we talked about sort of how you built the pricing strategy, your understanding of your payment orgs, you’re thinking about initial costs, investments, how that scales over time. So now you actually have to launch your payments offering, right? You’re doing this the first time. How did you prepare your teams?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah. So this was roadshows. We went to all the different functions. I would say sales was very important there. It’s actually very hard to sell payments. We’re a company that sells financing a lot. And so you would say, “Hey, as a fintech, we know how to sell financial products.” Payments is hard to sell. So we have a dedicated team of experts—one of them sitting in front here—that teaches the rest of the sales organization how to sell payments. But beyond that, what we also did is we set up this really interesting motion where we, rather than—when you talk about pricing—rather than going out with a price sheet and telling the contractor like, “Hey, this is our pricing, it’s better than the price you’re currently have,” et cetera, the first thing we do is we ask them for their statements. Then we take those statements, we run a simulation of what the cost would have been if they would have been on our platform, then we can come back with them, with like very concrete savings, where we say, “Hey, in Q1, you would have saved $20,000 if you were on our platform instead of your current platform.”

Again, by the way, a place where we have adopted AI, we have this little AI agent where, even during a meeting, we can feed those statements into an AI, and that gives an estimate already of the savings that the contractor would see if they were on our platform.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. I love that because then your sales teams can be more comfortable, right? There’s like in-the-moment action for them that they can immediately give the contractor, “These are your savings.” Right?

JORIS VAN MENS: For sure. And a back and forth conversation rather than just like a pitch, which is—

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah, and I think that’s great. On the go-to-market side, maybe from a marketing perspective, how are you thinking about marketing strategy on pricing? Do you put pricing on your website? Do you not? How did that conversation go?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yes. So our marketing team pushed really hard initially to put our pricing on our website. There was a lot of debate about it, but in the end, they’re the experts, and we ended up doing so, in particular, thinking that initially pricing was really a bit of a differentiator that we had. So we did that. In the end, it didn’t really end up mattering that much because our sales motion is really one where like the BDs and the sales teams, they sit with our current contracting base, and they sell the payments product to them. So our pricing existing, at least partially, on our website, didn’t really end up mattering that much for our sales cycle.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s an important experiment, I guess, but a learning. So GoodLeap Payments is about a year-and-a-half now?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, I think so. 2024.

DANIEL LEDFORD: So a young toddler starting to run around.

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Okay. So what did you learn from contractors after the launch? Did anything surprise you?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, quite a bit. I mean, we’re talking to contractors almost every day of the week, so we learn a lot continuously. I would say one interesting thing is that pricing doesn’t come up as much as we thought it would once they’re on our platform, right?

DANIEL LEDFORD: Everyone’s jealous here.

JORIS VAN MENS: Right, because we talked about this, you say that’s not common, but for us it’s actually not that big of a topic after contractors are on our platform, probably because we price fairly competitively. Second, we’ve built a really good product. We have—to brag a little bit—we have an NPS score around 80, which is considered really high. So they’re very happy with their product. So once contractors are on our platform, they’re happy with the pricing, they’re super happy with the product. It’s really about getting them through the front door on the platform itself. And so the conversations are really more about features. We’re launching ways to help them solve their receivables, a lot of different things. They care about their reporting, integrations, et cetera. So that’s more the nature of the discussions that we have.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. And with that data, how did that change your strategy? I think you’ve launched some things since then, and you had some learnings there about how you would do things differently or add on more functionality.

JORIS VAN MENS: In terms of pricing, in particular?

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah.

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We’ve changed a lot. So I think I already said our payments mix was kind of less favorable than we had anticipated it to be from the start. So one thing that we saw was more manual card entry, card-not-present, the contractor typing into digits. It’s just a really bad way to… It’s more costly. It’s also just a really bad way to pay. It’s very fraud sensitive. So there was one thing we saw, and we added a fee for manual card entry specifically both to kind of protect our margins as well as to kind of disincentivize that type of usage. And we now have actually contractors that are asking us for reports every week of like, “Hey, who in our company is still doing manual card entry because we don’t want to use it.” We did a lot of other things too.

We introduced interchange plus pricing recently. We set a cap on ACH. We had, ACH used to be a percentage of the transaction volume. And if you have a $100,000 transaction, that’s going to be pretty big bills just for taking an ACH payment. I think one thing I’m most excited about is faster payouts. We introduced that fairly recently, so speeds up payments, or payouts, by a day. And the willingness to pay for that from contractors is extremely high. So that turned out to be a fantastic way to also create some extra margin and make our contractor base super happy.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. So faster payouts is interesting. I want to dig in there a little bit more. You had maybe a feeling or an assumption or you had contractors asking for it, but then maybe it outperformed your assumptions. How would you navigate that for future launches? Are you using what you learned there to have more conversations for the next one, or you just like to be pleasantly surprised when the adoption is super high?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, it’s a great question. So we knew they cared about it a lot. Initially we were paying out, like we had a very long payout period, took like four days or so. We ended up shortening it already, to two days by default. And then with faster payouts, we do one day, and we might introduce Instant as well. So we knew they cared about it. We just didn’t know the extent to which they cared about it, in terms of like willingness to pay. There was just super high willingness to pay for that. So I mean, to get better at that, I don’t know if in the future perhaps we can do some more specific pointed research where we ask them about like, “Hey, what is the willingness to pay for a certain feature?”

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. All right. Last question. So for anyone here in the room that’s early in the process and maybe thinking about the framework, or how that applies to them, what’s the one thing that you wish you had known at the start?

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, I would say two things. And it’s not just me, but I think for companies in general that are embarking on payments, embedded payments, or platform payments. So first off, I think a lot of companies go into it thinking, “Hey, this could be a really big additional revenue line.” And it can be. It can be a very green P&L, it can be a great addition to your company. But there’s also a lot of up-front cost involved, both in terms of the, “building the restaurant” is what we were talking about, but also in terms of, if you want to attract customers initially, your pricing, a bit more competitive pricing might also be realistic. So I think having a bit of an expectation that there’s a bit of a build period to really get to that large revenue, large profit center.

And I think second, look, pricing is not static. We’ve already made, I don’t know, they’re hard to count, but maybe like five changes to our pricing structure over the course of the one-and-a-half year that our toddler is now alive and—

DANIEL LEDFORD: Until they go to college.

JORIS VAN MENS: Yeah, exactly. So it’s definitely not a static thing. It’s a very dynamic concept, and that would be another thing I would very much advise anyone going into this space is like, don’t just think about like, “Hey, this is going to be our pricing. This is how we’re going to put our pricing out to the market." Also think about subsequently, how are you thinking about making updates? How might you communicate them to your customer base? Do you want to do it at a certain frequency? I think that’s a very valuable conversation to have upfront.

DANIEL LEDFORD: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I think that’s a perfect note to end on. So thank you, Joris. That was incredibly practical. So to recap: remember the framework; pricing isn’t a one-time decision. Again, it’s a loop: research, target, launch, iterate. And I think you’ve exhibited that today, too, through our conversation. So every pass gets sharper. So keep at it. And if you’re looking for advice on the framework or sort of have questions about pricing, please come up and find us afterwards. We’re happy to chat. Keep the conversation going. So thank you.

JORIS VAN MENS: Thank you.