Enterprise learned pricing from Dutch drug dealers

Enterprise SaaS learned pricing from Dutch drug dealers. The first hit is always free. The second one costs your annual budget. The third one, you wake up in Tijuana missing a kidney.

This increased oligopolisation has real consequences on real lives.

Microsoft bought LinkedIn, GitHub, and Activision. If they could acquire oxygen, they would charge you a monthly subscription to breathe. With a 20% annual discount.

HubSpot will give you a free CRM. Then charge you for the privilege of making it actually do something. The first hit is always free. Ask any Dutch drug dealer. Hypothetically.

Salesforce's mascot is a friendly cloud character. How adorable. Nothing says "we will bleed your budget dry" like a cartoon bear in a Hawaiian shirt.

The average enterprise SaaS contract has more lock-in clauses than a prenuptial agreement. And somehow still less romantic.

Salesforce costs more per year than some of these companies make in revenue. And you need 10+ freaking tools to have some decent go-to-market motion as a business that is not in the Fortune 500.

Meanwhile, a Partner at McKinsey just invoiced someone £1,500 an hour to recommend "a more customer-centric approach." Groundbreaking stuff.

Let's put some numbers on it.

I said 10+ tools. The actual number is 106. That is the average SaaS app count per company in 2024. Turns out I was low-balling.

60% of global SaaS revenue goes to companies with 1,000+ employees. The industry is engineered to serve the Fortune 500 and ignore everyone else.

Meanwhile, Salesforce alone did $37.9 billion in revenue last year. The cartoon bear in the Hawaiian shirt is doing just fine.

This all affects lives.

Take a brilliant founder in New York who watches his life savings disappear. He cannot get the word out because he has almost no budget for GTM despite having an awesome product. He built something people want. He just cannot afford to tell them it exists.

Or the case of a marketing agency that feeds 20 families in London, who now lose their income in one month. Not because their company failed. Because the market turned and they did not have the tools to respond.

Or a Ukrainian IT company that loses 80% of its team. Not because of anything they did wrong. Because the tools to hedge were unaffordable, and they couldn't do a roadshow due to travel restrictions.

Three different cities. Three different stories. The same structural failure. All real.

This is not a market gap. It is a democratic problem.

A healthy economy needs a thriving middle. A strong class of SMEs and mid-market companies who employ the young, train the next generation, and prevent monopolies from hollowing out capitalism itself.

A mind-blowing 326 AI companies were acquired in 2024, up 20% year over year. Another 427 startup-on-startup M&A deals in the first half of 2025 alone.

The Goliaths are not competing with the cutting edge anymore. They are acquiring it. Talent, tech, IP. Hoovered up. The mid-market gets eaten for parts.

All of these go-to-market sciences, expertise, and wisdom are hoarded. Inside big tech companies like Google and top-tier strategy consultancies like McKinsey.

This requires deep subject matter expertise. A handful of people have it. And they often do not quit their six or seven figure jobs to start this entrepreneurial journey of hell. They are good where they are.

They have the best technology that acts as the conduit. The best scientific knowledge that fuels the engine. And the best talent who are the operators. Not to mention, a legal team the size of a small country to make sure nobody else gets any of it.

Until now.

David did not beat Goliath by getting a discount on Goliath's sword. He brought a completely different weapon.

That is what we are. A completely different weapon. A new paradigm. A GTMOS™ built on neurosymbolic cores.

Pebbles Ai exists to change that. One platform replacing 10+ tools. We are the GTM firepower companies need to win back market share from the Goliaths.

So after all of that. We are live. We built something we are genuinely proud of. Priced like a tool. Performs like a department.

Go try it out for free.

Written by Emin Can Turan, Founder and Lead Researcher at Pebbles Ai