Case study

Vendr — Explore

Senior Product Designer · 2022 – 2023

Procurement teams couldn't compare SaaS prices in one place. I led the creation of Explore — category browsing, pricing by SKU, and side-by-side package comparison — driving +17% purchase requests after launch.

Vendr Explore marketplace overview.

Company

Vendr is an enterprise procurement platform. They aim to revolutionize SaaS buying by making it simple for companies to Find, Buy, and Manage software. I worked on the team responsible for the "find" piece, letting clients price and compare thousands of products without ever talking to a sales rep. My team was a PM, EM, VP of Data, six engineers, and me.

Problem

Our target audience — SMB to mid-market procurement managers — had no centralized place to see comprehensive pricing and meaningfully compare SaaS offerings. Without a SaaS catalog, businesses struggled to make informed purchasing decisions, leading to cost inefficiencies and suboptimal selections.

One major challenge was standardizing pricing so users could compare apples to apples. SaaS pricing isn't standardized for reasons including:

  1. Diverse product offerings. SaaS spans many industries and functions, each with unique features, modules, and integrations.
  2. Customization and scalability. Customizable features, storage, seats, and add-ons all complicate any single pricing model.
  3. Pricing models and metrics. Flat-rate, tiered, usage-based — plus user-based, storage-based, and transaction-based metrics — are hard to harmonize.
  4. Competitive market dynamics. Dynamic pricing and promotional offers further fragment what "the" price even is.
  5. Evolving products. Features, integrations, and trends keep shifting, so any standardization needs ongoing maintenance.

Solution

Our MVP attempted to solve for pricing standardization by giving a median range (25th–75th percentile) of contract prices, broken down by company size to approximate contract volume and tier level.

MVP price range view, with median by company size.

A second iteration made the price range clearer to users, especially when comparing their current contract to the market average.

Second iteration of the price-range comparison.

Breaking pricing down by company size wasn't going to be good enough for our diverse user base. We knew we needed to break it down by tier and SKU. Several iterations went into solving this.

Iteration of pricing broken down by tier and SKU.
Further refinement of tier-level pricing display.

Once we could break pricing down by tier and produce a more accurate "Vestimate," we unlocked the ability to build package prices and compare those packages to similar products.

Package builder showing bundled SKU pricing.
Side-by-side package comparison view.

The result

We released the MVP to customers, who were excited to discover products on the platform, see a price range, and start a purchase using the Workflows tool. With follow-up features — category browsing, package building, and product comparison — Explore drove +17% purchase requests after launch and positioned Vendr as the first stop for software research.