Compare approaches
Pricing software, pricing consultants, or both?
Most B2B tech companies pick one, and end up with half a pricing function. Software gives you tools but no judgement. Consultants give you judgement, once.
Mondrio is your on call pricing manager: AI agents and pricing architects who keep pricing moving, continuously. Here's how the three approaches compare, including where we're the wrong choice.
Two halves of one job
Pricing needs judgement, and it needs to keep happening. Software gives you the second half. Consultants give you the first. Most companies buy one and quietly live without the other.
Here is what each one actually buys you: the same four questions, asked of all three.
Pricing software
A licence for a pricing tool.
- Who runs it
- Your team, if you have someone free.
- What it costs
- An annual licence, whether or not anyone logs in.
- Four months in
- As useful as whoever is driving it.
- What you keep
- The tool, and whatever you managed to put into it.
Mondrio
Pricing architects and AI agents, on call.
- Who runs it
- Us, the pricing team you already have, or both together.
- What it costs
- One agreement covering both the platform and the people.
- Four months in
- Pricing in line with the value you now deliver.
- What you keep
- The capability, and the reasoning behind every decision.
Pricing consultants
A project with pricing experts.
- Who runs it
- Their team, for the length of the project.
- What it costs
- A project fee, paid once, sized to the scope.
- Four months in
- Good answers, calibrated to the market as it was.
- What you keep
- A model and a deck. The reasoning leaves with them.
Mondrio adapts to how you're set up. We can manage pricing for you outright, or make the pricing owner or team you already have considerably faster.
The honest version of each
Including the part each one is genuinely good at.
Pricing software alone
Buying a pricing tool assumes you have someone to drive it. Most B2B tech companies under 500 people don't have a pricing owner. Pricing sits between product, finance and sales, which means it sits nowhere.
So the tool gets nominated rather than owned. Someone in finance picks it up as their fifth priority, the model gets built once during onboarding, and it is never revisited, because nobody's quarter depends on it. That is not a failure of discipline. It is what happens to any system that belongs to everyone.
A licence without an owner becomes a dashboard nobody opens. The tool isn't the problem. The missing role is.
And where the role does exist, a licence still assumes one person can run continuous research, keep the model current, and review deals as they arrive. That is three jobs. Good pricing managers are usually short of capacity and sparring partners, not short of dashboards.
Best when: you already have a pricing owner, and what they need is better instruments rather than more expertise or more hands.
Pricing consultants alone
A good pricing consultancy will tell you things you didn't know. The work is genuinely deep, the outside view is worth paying for, and for a one time repricing it can be exactly right.
But it ends. You get a model, a deck, and a set of recommendations calibrated to the market as it was during the engagement. Four months later your product has changed, your competitors have moved, and the reasoning behind the model has left the building with the people who did it.
There is a second problem, which is that a recommendation is not a price change. The new structure lands on a sales team that wasn't in the room when the reasoning was built, so the first hard negotiation reopens it, and within a quarter discounting has drifted back to roughly where it started. The analysis was right. Nobody stayed to defend it.
Best when: you have one big decision to make, and the internal muscle to carry it afterwards.
Mondrio: both, continuously
Pricing architects who've supported 150+ companies, on call in your Slack or Teams, working alongside AI agents that handle the continuous part: willingness to pay research, proposal drafting, and monitoring what's drifting.
In practice a month looks like this. A read on what a new feature is worth before you put a number on it. A proposal reviewed before it reaches the customer. A flag when discounting in one segment has drifted past the guardrail, while it is still one deal and not yet a pattern.
Two modules. Pricing Studio for strategy: research, modelling, segmentation, testing. Deal Hub for execution: quoting, approvals, margin guardrails.
And a hard rule. Nothing changes without your approval. The agents propose, you decide.
Best when: pricing matters to your revenue. If nobody owns it, we can be that owner. If you already have a pricing manager or a whole team, better still: they get architects to think alongside and agents to absorb the continuous work, which is leverage rather than another licence to administer.
When we're not the right fit
Worth saying plainly, because it saves us both a call.
You need one repricing to last the next five years
Highly unrecommended, but if that is genuinely the plan, a consultancy will do it more cheaply than an ongoing partnership.
You're pre product market fit
Price on instinct and move fast. Come back when you're defending margin instead of finding demand.
You want a dynamic pricing tool to track customer behaviour
That is usually a B2C or high volume ecommerce need: algorithmic, changed daily. We do B2B pricing strategy and deal execution, so a dynamic pricing engine is the better buy.
Pricing isn't a project you finish
It's a capability you build. Every month without a pricing review is a month of compounding revenue left on the table.
Thirty minutes with one of our pricing architects. No pitch, just your pricing and an outside read on it.
Schedule a sparring session