Design Durable Profit.
The commercial architecture system for software-enabled solutions.
AI is rewriting the rules of software monetization. Per-seat subscriptions are breaking down. Hardware margins are thinning. The companies that design their commercial architecture now will set the terms. Everyone else will react.
I build and sell software
SaaS and software companies whose monetization model is under pressure from AI, competition, or investor expectations.
I make products with software
Manufacturers and device companies building profitable software revenue streams alongside physical products.
I practice SAFe/Agile
SPCs, agile coaches, and consultants who understand Value Streams and want to bring Profit Streams to the business side of their organizations.
Profit Streams™ covers the six dimensions that determine how your solution actually makes money — together. Across the entire solution lifecycle. Not just at launch.
Value Exchange • Pricing • Packaging • Licensing • Enforcement • Customer ROI
"We hired Applied Frameworks to help us redesign our pricing and packaging. The results have been amazing! CARR has increased by 35%, and new logos choosing an annual plan has increased from 20% to 65%, significantly improving cash flow and preparing us for our next phase of growth"
Our Clients Include:
Profit Streams™ are a team sport
Both the Software Profit Streams book and the Profit Stream Canvas will help business leaders and teams involved in creating, pricing, selling, distributing, and licensing software-enabled solutions.
Design sustainable profit with Software Profit Streams™
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Replaces the old, boring books on pricing with a visually stunning book and practical insights
Unlock sustainable profit with Software Profit Streams™
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Replaces the old, boring books on pricing with a visually stunning book and practical insights
Access blogs, tools, and more to learn more about sustainable profitability.
Profit Streams Podcast
The Profit Streams™ Podcast evaluates business models for software-enabled solutions, pricing and licensing, packaging and positioning, and decision making patterns for our audience of business leaders, product leaders, and investors.
For the product leader handed a pricing initiative
How to Manage a Pricing Initiative
By Kevin McCabe | Applied Frameworks
Someone handed you this initiative. Maybe it was framed as an opportunity. Maybe it arrived as a line item in your performance goals. Maybe your CEO said pricing was broken and you were going to fix it. However it happened, here you are. This book is for that moment.
7 templates. Two-part structure: Build the model. Land it with the organization.
Applied Frameworks
Most pricing initiatives fail.
Not because the analysis was wrong.
The failure modes are not mysterious. They repeat across companies and industries with enough consistency that you can run a diagnostic on your initiative right now — before you've done any of the work — and identify which risks are already present.
The rate card is the output, not the input. Pricing built without a value model is built on sand.
A committee has no answer when the CRO pushes back.
Sales resistance to pricing changes is rational. The fix is earlier enrollment, not better training.
A sponsor who attends the kickoff and the final presentation is a reviewer, not a sponsor.
Pricing initiatives attract scope. The discipline is shipping a defined set of changes in a defined window.
'Let's revisit this next quarter' is where pricing initiatives go to die slowly.
This book is about recognizing these failure modes before you make them — and building the commercial model and the organizational alignment to get past them.
Two parts. One sequence.
The analytical work — building the value model, designing packaging, and writing pricing rules that hold under negotiation. Each chapter is usable on its own. But the sequence exists for a reason.
Build the customer value model and choose the value metric — the single most consequential packaging decision most teams make too quickly.
Design tiers for the right buyer profiles, not arbitrary feature bundles. Set fences that hold under sales pressure. Build upgrade logic that customers can see before they need it.
A rate card is not a pricing model. This chapter builds the policy layer — discount authority, volume pricing, and the review cadence — that makes the rate card defensible.
The organizational work — the review meeting that kills initiatives, migrating existing customers, and measuring whether it worked. This is the part most pricing books skip.
The internal presentation of a pricing recommendation is a sales call. What the CFO is actually worried about, what the CRO is actually worried about, and how to frame the recommendation to get a decision.
The three migration options and how to choose. How to handle customers who are worse off under the new model. How to use migration as an expansion motion.
The five metrics that matter, how to baseline them before launch, and how to report results without overstating attribution. The 90-day post-launch review as a learning document.
Seven templates. Built to use, not just read.
Every template in this book is designed to be filled in — not studied. They are organized in the sequence of the work.
Downloadable versions live at profit-streams.com/profit-stream-canvas — free, no additional signup required if you've already registered for the Canvas.
This book is for the person who owns the initiative — not the executive who commissioned it.
CPOs, Heads of Product, and product managers who have been handed pricing as an initiative and need a structured process — not a theory.
Commercial, revenue operations, or strategy leaders tasked with coordinating a pricing change across Sales, Finance, Product, and Legal.
Partners, advisors, and coaches helping clients through pricing initiatives. The book is a shared framework that aligns the engagement.
…the executive who wants a theory of pricing. Software Profit Streams by Hohmann and Tanner is that book. Not for the analyst building a pricing model in a spreadsheet. Not for the sales leader looking for negotiation tactics.
The book follows the Canvas. The Canvas lives in Horizon.
This book does not invent a new methodology. It is the practitioner guide to running the initiative that the Profit Streams Canvas structures. The Canvas is the design tool. The book is how you run the work.
| Resource | Role | How it connects to this book |
|---|---|---|
| Drift | Upstream awareness | Drift names the structural misalignment that makes a pricing initiative necessary. If someone read Drift and recognized their organization, this book is their next step. Read Drift → |
| Profit Stream Canvas™ | The design tool | The book explicitly follows the Canvas structure. The Canvas is where you design the architecture this book teaches you to run as an initiative. Companion templates → |
| Software Profit Streams | The methodology | The intellectual framework behind the sequence this book follows. If you want to understand the methodology — why value work precedes packaging, why packaging precedes pricing rules — that is where to look. Get the book → |
| Horizon Profit Streams® Coming soon | The software home | The templates in this book will have a permanent software home in Horizon — where decisions are maintained as living documents, not files in a shared drive. Track the roadmap → |
Kevin McCabe is a partner at Applied Frameworks, where he works with software companies and manufacturers on pricing, packaging, and solution profitability. He has advised companies across industrial technology, vertical SaaS, and connected device markets on building profit architecture that survives both enterprise negotiation and organizational change.
This book follows the Profit Streams Canvas, developed by Luke Hohmann and Jason Tanner at Applied Frameworks. Kevin's contribution is the practitioner layer — the sequence, the organizational work, and the templates for running the initiative.
Someone handed you this initiative.
Here's where to start.
The book is free. The templates are free. The sequence is proven.
Get the book — free PDFHorizon Profit Streams — the software home for this work — is coming. Track the roadmap →