Software ships faster than its pricing moves.
Most of the value you built this year is being given away in last year's packages.
I run pricing and monetisation programmes for B2B software companies and their investors: packaging, price metrics and AI monetisation, at single-company and portfolio scale.
Book 30 minutes emil@hjortflod-advisory.com
The argument
Most software companies are better at creating value than capturing it, and the gap is widening. Product teams now ship in weeks what used to take quarters, but the pricing model has not moved in years: new features land in existing tiers by default, packaging piles up into commercial debt, and nobody owns the decision of what a release should change on the invoice. The median private B2B SaaS company runs a net revenue retention around 101%, so expansion barely covers churn and growth has to be bought instead of compounded.
AI sharpens both edges. Four in five B2B software companies ship AI features with no defined way to price them, and fewer still ever invoice one. Those features carry real inference costs and gross margins of 50–60%, against the 60–90% the classic SaaS model was built on. Ship them for free and you have made a margin decision, most companies just have not made it deliberately. The few that do price them build real margin on them.
Investors have noticed: pricing is currently the fastest-payback value-creation lever in software private equity, and the hardest one to staff. And the next question is already on the table: when your customers' agents use your product instead of your customers, what is the unit, and can your billing charge for it?
The distance between the value a product creates and the value the model captures is the only thing I work on.
Working with me
DiagnoseFind the leak
For a single company or across a fund's whole software portfolio: where pricing models, packaging, and unpriced AI leak value, ranked and sized against your actual ARR. Four weeks, and about 15 hours of your organisation's time.
RedesignFix the model
Senior-only sprints of eight to twelve weeks: repricing, package remodelling, AI-feature monetisation, from design through migration plan, including the legacy base and the bespoke contracts everyone else avoids.
SustainKeep it fixed
Most pricing projects end at launch. The value-capture cycle doesn't. I install and run the annual repricing discipline (cadence, governance, review) per company or across a portfolio.
Engagements are fixed-fee, and you get me, not a leveraged team. I work evidence-first: controlled pilots, clean before-and-after reads, and leading indicators (win rates, cycle length, gross margin on the new tier, cohort NRR against a control) so you see the signal long before the lagging metrics land.
At a Nasdaq-listed SaaS company I led a full repricing, package remodel, and migration of the entire customer base: portfolio ARR up more than 30%, new-business conversion up 22%, ACV up nearly 20%, with no measurable impact on churn, while collapsing 100+ legacy packages into three and automating the migration of thousands of long-tail customers. Until August 2026 I ran the same discipline across a portfolio of 160+ software companies with €2.6B in combined ARR.
About
I'm Emil Ellekær Hjortflod. Until August 2026 I ran pricing and AI-monetisation programmes across one of Europe's largest B2B software groups (160+ companies in 33 countries), advising managing directors and boards on what to fix and in which order. Since September 2026 I do the same work independently. Before that I led repricing and packaging programmes in four companies across software, subscription, and services, and built revenue operations end-to-end at a listed SaaS company.
External Lecturer, Digital Business, Copenhagen Business School
Commercial Advisor, CO2 Angels (ESA-supported agritech AI)
Board-level advisory across B2B software
Danish & English · Copenhagen