Practical approaches to customer segmentation, the art of packaging features into modular tiers, why decoupling provisioning from your codebase creates flexibility, and tactics for optimizing your pricing structure across global markets.
Founded in 2014, Sesame HR grown into a leading HR management platform in Europe, serving over 300,000 users across 30+ countries with solutions spanning time tracking, absence management, performance reviews, and onboarding. As the company expanded beyond its Spanish roots, it faced a classic SaaS challenge: how to package its platform for diverse customer segments while aligning monetization with value.
Meet Silvia Valero Verche, Sesame HR’s Chief of Product Expansion. She drives the company’s growth strategy by expanding into new markets and customer segments. Alongside her is Rafel Soriano García, the Chief Data Officer and one of the company’s earliest team members. Garcia drives the data infrastructure that keeps Sesame HR scalable and insight-driven.
In this edition of Pricing Labs, Valero and Soriano discuss their hands-on approach to modular packaging, aligning product offerings with diverse customer needs. In this article, we'll share key insights from our conversation about subscription pricing strategy. We covered practical approaches to customer segmentation, the art of packaging features into modular tiers, why decoupling provisioning from your codebase creates flexibility, and tactics for optimizing your pricing structure across global markets.
Sesame HR's journey toward modular packaging began as they observed a significant shift in their customer base. "One key change we've seen over the past year is the number of employees per company among our clients," says Valero. “These larger clients demand greater flexibility, preferring a customized approach where features are deployed gradually over a set period for specific teams, and they're willing to pay for that flexibility,” she explains.
Meanwhile, research with small businesses revealed different priorities. These clients appreciated Sesame HR's comprehensive feature set but wanted to pay only for features they actively use, adding more only when needed.
The customer research revealed a key insight: customers weren’t just price-sensitive; they were value-driven. "It’s not about the price; it’s about having the right solution for the problem."
Special Case: Sesame AI
Sesame HR took a different approach with AI capabilities, offering them at a consistent price point across all segments. "We want the most people to try our AI capabilities," explains Valero. This adoption-first strategy deliberately breaks away from their traditional segmentation model, instead leveraging usage data and feedback to enhance their AI models. This investment in future capabilities will eventually inform their packaging as the technology evolves.
Sesame HR's simple pricing for AI features reduces customer confusion and encourages more people to use them.
This approach contains an important lesson: sometimes, getting more customers to use new features is worth more than maximizing immediate revenue. This is especially true for new technologies where learning from usage helps improve the product.
With their customer segments defined, Sesame HR needed pricing that matched each group's values, for which they combined data insights with direct customer conversations.
"We assigned scores to each feature, analyzing adoption patterns to validate its impact. Then we combined this data-driven approach with qualitative insights from customer interviews and feedback from our go-to-market teams," said Soriano.
This exercise led to a three-component structure:
This approach mirrors key principles from Simon-Kucher's Leader, Filler, and Killer framework. It helps categorize features by their perceived value—leaders drive willingness to pay, fillers add completeness, and killers are unnecessary or overly complex.
To validate their approach, Sesame HR uses a combination of trial-to-pay conversion metrics, expansion revenue and movement across tiers, and churn risks.
After Sesame HR completed its research and strategy, it faced implementation challenges. Its technical systems determined whether it could execute its plan immediately or needed to delay it.
Sesame HR decided to streamline its Entitlement Management System (EMS) to have packaging flexibility. The EMS is central to this process, as it connects product features to customer access, managing which features clients can use, how much they can use, and what happens when they reach their limits.
Like most SaaS companies, Sesame HR initially managed feature access directly in its code. "Before Chargebee, we managed everything manually through our development team," Soriano explains. "We had scattered conditional statements throughout our code to control feature access. This created a lot of tech debt and became increasingly difficult to maintain as we grew."
This approach created several cascading challenges:
The main issue wasn't technical ability—it was competing priorities. "We have a great engineering team. Could they rebuild our provisioning system? Absolutely. But the problem was prioritization," says Valero. "When developers are already busy with 20 other priorities, even a simple change can take a week, which slows us down."
Sesame HR solved this by separating product development from packaging controls using Chargebee Entitlements. "By moving feature access control out of our code, we saved engineering time without compromising security while giving our business teams the independence they needed."
This change also fixed its long-term provisioning problems. Now, the Product team can set up tiered features, encourage upgrades, and support account growth. The sales and marketing teams can offer feature trials and adjust usage limits for specific customer groups—all within boundaries set by engineering.
Related Read: Entitlement Management - A Comprehensive Guide
Operating in global markets adds more layers of complexity to pricing and packaging. Sesame HR's new approach to packaging needed to adapt to regional market dynamics.
"We started using Chargebee's Variant Pricing specifically for international expansion," explains Valero. "Even within the same currency, market conditions and purchasing power vary significantly. For example, we needed different price points for Spain and Italy despite both using the Euro."
Sesame HR’s experience highlights a key principle: effective packaging should accommodate regional flexibility without requiring a complete redesign. You can preserve your core packaging structure while adjusting the following:
Sesame HR takes a deliberate, phased approach to rolling out pricing and packaging changes. “We start conservatively with new customers, then gradually introduce changes to existing ones—tier by tier, not all at once,” explains Valero. This staged rollout helps minimize risk and allows Sesame HR to refine its strategy based on early feedback.
For existing customers, its communication strategy includes:
Key Takeaway: A successful pricing transition isn’t just about what changes but how you roll them out. A phased approach, combined with clear, value-driven communication, reduces friction and helps maintain customer trust.
With these key elements in place, Sesame HR can now run advanced packaging tests they couldn't do before, such as:
Sesame HR's journey offers a blueprint for companies considering packaging changes:
The most successful packaging strategies are not static — they adapt and evolve alongside your customers, market, and product. Establishing a strong technical foundation and adopting a customer-centric approach can transform packaging from a potential obstacle to a consistent competitive advantage.
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