Business & Legal Discover the enterprise budget instead of inventing a price
Security researcher and CTF player running AISafe Labs
Corporations of a certain size already run a budget line for your category: security, compliance, developer tooling, whatever the shelf is called internally. The money exists and procurement is used to spending it, so the pricing call is less "convince them to pay" and more "discover the number." On discovery, ask what the team already spends on adjacent tools or what last year's budget for the category was, and land inside the familiar range. The absolute number matters less than being in a bucket finance does not have to fight for. Founders who invent a price from scratch almost always land below the budget the buyer was ready to spend.
Related advice
Fineas Silaghi Choose the market where SaaS competitors cannot follow
AISafe sells into corporate networks, regulated industries, and air-gapped deployments, environments where running as a SaaS is simply not an option. Most security competitors are SaaS-only because it is cheaper and faster to build, which means they physically cannot serve a buyer who needs the tool inside their own network and compliance boundary. Fineas treats that requirement not as a limitation to apologize for but as the moat itself: the constraint that makes the product harder to ship is the same constraint that locks the convenient competitors out. When a market punishes the lazy approach everyone else takes, being the one who does the hard version is the whole advantage.
Fineas Silaghi Let the on-prem support reality reshape the whole company
When AISafe runs inside a customer network, Fineas loses live logs, the freedom to hotfix, and any telemetry he did not contractually negotiate. Beyond what that does to the price, it reshapes how the company is built: support has to be staffed for blind debugging, the software has to be written to be diagnosable without a live connection, and the whole engineering culture has to absorb slower, more deliberate releases. Founders selling on-prem should treat the support model as an architectural and organizational decision, not only a pricing input. The way you will have to support the product after the sale should influence how you build the product and the team long before the first contract is signed.
Fineas Silaghi Price on-prem for the support reality, not the demo
On-prem is not SaaS with a different installer. Once the software lives inside a customer network you lose live logs, hotfix freedom, and telemetry unless you explicitly negotiated for them. Support engineers spend materially more time per customer on debugging, upgrades, and escalations than any SaaS cost model captures, and that time has to be priced in before you name a number. If on-prem is priced like SaaS, the first production incident eats the margin on the account. The safe heuristic is to model a realistic support load per customer per year, multiply by a loaded engineering rate, and treat that number as the floor, not a contingency.
Fineas Silaghi Build the security product from an attacker's eye
Fineas came to AISafe from offensive security: a researcher and CTF player whose habit was to dive into hard systems and find ways to exploit them. Building a security product on top of that background is an advantage, because the person designing it already knows which assumptions break under a real attack and which ones an attacker walks straight through. Founders who only ever read the documentation tend to protect against the threats they can imagine; founders who spent years attacking understand the threats that actually get used. If your edge is knowing how to break something, the strongest product you can build is the one shaped by that exact knowledge.
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Indie TM #7: News as a Traffic Locomotive