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Salesforge built seven AI-based products and never let billing get in the way.
Salesforge is an AI-native sales platform that helps B2B companies in the US and Western Europe build pipeline with less headcount. It started with a single product and now sells a suite of seven: Salesforge for AI-assisted outreach, Leadsforge for lead data aggregation, Mailforge, Primeforge, and Infraforge for email infrastructure, and Warmforge for deliverability. Agent Frank, its autonomous sales development representative (SDR), draws on every product to run outbound from prospecting to booked meetings.
Based in Tallinn, Estonia, Salesforge’s team grew to 50 people in three years, split evenly across go-to-market and product engineering. From day one, pricing authority sat with Chief Product Officer Dovydas Volodko, reinforcing Salesforge’s belief that pricing is a core product decision, not a finance afterthought.
The Challenge
Founder and CEO Frank Sondors started Salesforge with a single product and ambitious plans to build a modular suite. Each product would carry its own pricing structure, its own add-ons, and a different underlying cost profile.
These plans spurred Sondors to treat billing as a foundational choice. He knew the company’s billing infrastructure would eventually need to support several pricing models at once and grow as the company shipped more.
Moreover, even with just one product, Salesforge ran into real financial complexity. It billed recurring subscriptions alongside one-off charges that fell outside monthly recurring revenue (MRR), such as premium onboarding, which ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. As a European company, it also had to handle EU value-added tax (VAT) correctly, so business customers with valid VAT IDs qualified for a tax exemption. Building that logic in-house would have carried a clear cost.
Sondors had run Chargebee at an earlier company, so he made the call to go all-in on Chargebee’s AI monetization and billing infrastructure early, before launching Salesforge’s second product.
"If Chargebee didn't exist, we'd need one or two engineers to build out the billing platform and manage all the different logic," Sondors said. "We don't have the competence in this area, and I don't think a startup should."
The Solution
Sondors built the first Chargebee integration himself in a few hours, then handed the application programming interface (API) documentation to his co-founder and CTO, Daniel Sanchez, who finished it in a few more. That’s right: two non-billing engineers got Chargebee running in one day.
"Building billing isn't a core competency an AI startup should have. It's the same logic as not building your own CRM. Chargebee meant we never had to hire engineers for billing. We hired them to build Salesforge." — Frank Sondors, CEO & Founder, Salesforge
That early foundation is what let Salesforge add six more products without building or hiring additional engineers to manage its billing. Each new product connected to Chargebee without revisiting the core setup. The offering grew from one product to seven while billing absorbed the pricing complexity underneath.
Today, Chargebee Billing holds Salesforge’s whole catalog in one place. Each product offers two or three base plans with a wide set of add-ons and usage-based billing on top. One-off charges and recurring subscriptions are billed side by side, and Salesforge tracks total revenue and MRR as separate figures.
A catalog of base plans and revenue-driving add-ons
Salesforge asks customers to buy a base plan first, a minimum purchase or credit amount. Those base plans set a threshold that filters out very small customers who create disproportionate support demands. Most revenue then comes from add-ons, rather than base plans.
When the team wants to launch a new plan or add-on, it can go live in minutes. "Even an intern could go in and add a new plan or add-on," Sondors said.
How Salesforge decides how to price each product
Salesforge put pricing under Chief Product Officer, Dovydas Volodko, a deliberate call by Sondors. In product-led companies, pricing authority tends to move to product as the business matures. Sondors wanted that ownership established early so the handover would feel gradual rather than abrupt. “Otherwise it would be a bit of a shock to take over,” he said.
Today the decision sits squarely with product. “Pricing is product,” Volodko said.
The method starts with cost, not with the competition. Before a price is chosen, Volodko models what the product costs Salesforge to deliver: the underlying provider cost per unit, the usage a typical account will actually generate, and a target gross margin the product has to clear. He models the worst case rather than the average, on the principle that a price is only sound if it survives the customer who uses the product hardest. The price is the output of that model. Competitor pricing is checked afterwards, as a sanity check on where the answer landed, not as the method itself.
That’s why each product runs on a different pricing model. The model mirrors how the cost behaves, and usually how the supplier bills Salesforge in the first place:
Where the underlying cost is flat, the product is billed as a flat fee.
Where cost scales with the customer, it runs on volume or graduated tiers.
Where a provider charges per event, Salesforge charges per event.
The flagship product bills on usage, set up on a stair-step model. The AI agents run on usage tiers with credit buckets, so customers keep working when they reach a monthly limit.
“Having the ability to choose from various models is super beneficial,” Sondors said.
When the numbers don’t work, the first move is upstream. Rather than raise a customer’s price to protect a margin, Volodko goes back to the supplier, renegotiating volume terms, switching providers, or removing cost from the product itself. Customer-facing prices change only when the cost structure genuinely has.
Margin is also managed across the suite rather than product by product. Because a single customer can hold several of the seven products, margin pools across the catalog. That lets a new AI agent launch at thin or even negative margin while Salesforge finds product-market and product-channel fit. “Some products may make us no money, or we’re actually losing money,” Sondors said. Keeping agent prices low enough wins early adoption, and because underlying agent costs can swing sharply, Volodko wants granular margin control as those costs move.
Discounting is the last lever, not the first. Salesforge holds its list prices and uses credits, annual commitments and added volume to close deals instead, a deliberate choice to keep the price architecture intact rather than eroding it one negotiation at a time.
Pricing is revisited roughly once a quarter, but the real triggers are events rather than the calendar: a supplier cost change, a provider swap, or a new product entering rollout. Nothing ships until its price is agreed. When unit economics aren’t ready, the launch waits.
That cadence is only survivable because changing a price with Chargebee costs Salesforge nothing.
Choosing among so many pricing models was the hardest early call, because the team lacked the experience to know which model fit each product. But, the risk of making the wrong choice upfront was inherently reduced with Chargebee as the foundation. Plans and add-ons can be added or removed in minutes, so a pricing mistake is cheap and quick to reverse.
The Results
The Results
Doubled ARR in first seven months of 2026
Seven products launched in three years, all billed with Chargebee
Zero billing engineers needed to build or run billing
Initial implementation completed in hours by the CEO and CTO
Pricing updated roughly once per quarter
Building and maintaining billing in-house would have tied up one or two engineers permanently, pulling them off the core product. With Chargebee, Salesforge scaled from one product to seven without adding a single billing engineer.
The Salesforge support team uses Chargebee daily to add credits, issue refunds, and resolve billing questions without escalating to engineering. Sondors logs in every day and treats Chargebee as the source of truth for MRR and financial data.
Salesforge also exports Chargebee data to data-visualization tools, AI agents, and a local Estonian accounting connector, then analyzes it in a shared data warehouse.
Looking Ahead
Salesforge plans to evolve how it charges for its AI agents. Agent Frank runs on usage tiers with credit buckets today, so customers keep working when they reach a monthly limit. Sondors expects to move toward true usage-based pricing as underlying agent costs shift.
Chargebee's recent rollout of agentic pricing gives Salesforge a path to blend traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing with usage-based models for agent behavior. With seven products in market and more planned, Salesforge changes pricing roughly once per quarter and expects that cadence to hold.
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