Turn your policy into training.
Create documented proof of understanding for audits.
Most B2B software is overpriced, but in my not so humble opinion, nothing beats security awareness or compliance training.
We've all grown accustomed to the same trickery:
And what do you get in return? A generic training program that you could have generated with AI in a matter of minutes.
All of this is industry standard. You may even wonder why any of the above is wrong in the first place. And if that's the case, you've had too much of the Kool-Aid.
In this article, I'm going to share why the current pricing model of 99% of all compliance training software platforms is nothing more than a display of corporate greed and how it should be improved.
9 out of 10 compliance training platforms don't share their pricing on their website.
This has been a best practice in business software for years. It started with sellers of enterprise software. Enterprise software often comes with a lot of custom integrations, account management, technical support, and so on. This makes it close to impossible to create one-size-fits-all pricing plans. For them, not sharing a fixed price makes sense.
But this form of customization simply doesn't happen in compliance training land. All vendors have a standard set of training programs that they sell to everybody. Maybe they'll charge extra for building an integration with an LMS, but that's about it.
We all know why they really hide their pricing: they want to negotiate like car salesmen:
If you've ever bought a car, kitchen, or bathroom, you know exactly how this feels. It's a game, and as a customer, you have to play it. You have to do the hard work of talking to multiple salesmen to figure out the best price. And if you don't feel like doing that, which most people don't, you're simply going to overpay.
There is no standard price. There is just whatever you're willing to pay.
The fix is simple: put the price on the website. A number, what it includes, and what it doesn't. If your pricing is too complicated to display on a single page, that's not a transparency problem. It's a pricing problem.
The reason so many entrepreneurs go into selling business software is because it's standard practice to sell licenses per user.
But just because it's standard, doesn't mean it's always fair.
Why would you have to pay more for adding a few new colleagues to your training program? Is it because the vendor has to make more server costs? Do support costs go up?
The charitable interpretation is that more employees means more value delivered: more people trained, more risk reduced, more audit coverage. But that's the customer's value, not the vendor's. The vendor didn't do more work. They didn't write new content or build new features. They just watched your headcount grow and sent a bigger invoice. Charging more for that isn't value-based pricing. It's opportunistic pricing.
Of course there's something to be said for monthly subscriptions. You have to improve the software, fix bugs, and keep training content up-to-date. But that work remains exactly the same whether your customer has 500 or 1000 users.
As a customer, you're getting punished for growing.
Another trick the software industry gladly takes from the car salesmen: add-ons.
What's different is that for the automotive industry, add-ons actually make sense. If you want a heated steering wheel and deluxe chrome rims, it makes sense that you pay more. The car company makes more costs, you pay for that.
It doesn't work like that in security awareness or compliance training.
Still, many vendors sell industry-specific training programs as add-ons. The implication is that this content requires extra work: custom production, specialist input, ongoing maintenance. But look at what you're actually buying: a handful of extra video modules on topics like financial regulations or healthcare data handling, dropped into the same platform you're already paying for. If it were genuinely custom, you'd expect a scoping conversation, a timeline, a deliverable. Instead, you get a checkbox in your account settings and a line item on your invoice. The content was already there. They just decided to lock it.
Let's stick with the analogy of buying a car. No matter if you buy the cheapest or the most expensive car in the dealership's catalog, you expect good customer service when it breaks down.
With business software, many have accepted that your support is as good as whatever you pay for. If you're a small business on the lowest tier, you're used to being sent to a help center, a chatbot, and if you're lucky, you're able to find the support team's email address. High-quality, real-time support? That's for the enterprise customers.
The reasoning behind this is simple. These software companies have built their businesses on the backs of large customers. If one of those customers leaves, they feel it. That's why their only concern is investing in keeping the big fish happy.
You can also see this in the way products develop over time. New features rarely focus on making smaller customers happy. They're focused on helping the company go up-market
Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, once shared the following image to describe one of his core business philosophies.
The image is a picture of his company Basecamp, where all small dots represent one of their customers. It looks like static. Every customer pays the exact same amount, no matter their size and number of users.
To Jason, this is what it looks like to run a healthy business. If one customer drops out, your business will still run. The picture above will barely change. As a business, you don't depend on pleasing big customers to keep you afloat.
The implication for compliance training is straightforward: charge everyone the same flat amount, and give everyone the same support. No enterprise tier with a dedicated account manager while small teams get routed to a chatbot. One product, one price, one level of service. If that model means you can't afford to chase enterprise whales, that's a constraint worth accepting, because it means every customer on your list is one you can actually serve well.
A company of 20, 50, maybe 80 people. They need to get ISO 27001 certified, or SOC 2, or they're dealing with a client who wants proof of GDPR training before signing a contract. They're not a compliance team. They're a product team, or an operations team, or a founder wearing six hats. They don't need an enterprise platform. They need the training done.
They look at the market and find tools that won't show prices, tools that charge per user, tools that require a demo call just to understand the cost. They finally settle for a vendor and get handed a bill that scales with every hire. Growth becomes expensive and the vendor profits from their success without doing anything additional to earn it.
We think that's wrong. So Securan is flat-rate: one price, regardless of headcount. Pricing is on the website in plain numbers. The features you need are included. That's it.
If someone asks you why the software costs what it costs, you should be able to answer in one sentence. "It's X per month, for everything, for everyone on your team." That sentence should make sense.
"It's X per user per month, plus an implementation fee, plus add-ons for certain features, with a discount that depends on contract length" — that's not a price. That's a negotiating position. And if even that negotiating position isn't published anywhere, it's not even that. It's just a number they made up for you, specifically, based on how much they thought they could get.
We're not interested in that game. We're interested in customers who find our software useful and pay us a straightforward amount for it. That's the whole deal.
If that sounds simple, it is. Pricing doesn't have to be complicated or expensive or opaque. You just have to find a vendor who's not trying to make it that way.
Create documented proof of understanding for audits.
Securan is a platform that turns your SOP into a training program for documented proof of understanding.
