A decade of pricing expertise becomes a SaaS pricing platform built for beta

Who built it, and what they built

Nikhil Kotcharlakota is the Founder and CEO of PriceOps, a Hyderabad-based startup building pricing software for SaaS businesses. The company began in June 2022 with two co-founders and a team of two.

PriceOps centers on a pricing engine that helps companies pick a pricing strategy and model, then analyzes live customer data to recommend changes aimed at lifting revenue or profit. A second major feature, packaging, is designed to let companies publish a pricing page and connect it to a payment gateway with little or no code. The team is also exploring AI for pricing research and value modeling.

Where the idea came from

Nikhil discovered pricing as a career only after finishing his MBA, then spent roughly a decade in the field, rising from analyst roles to Head of Pricing. Along the way, the work he enjoyed most was making pricing understandable across an organization so others could see its impact.

While in the US, he spoke with many SaaS companies about how they handled pricing and saw a consistent gap: little pricing expertise, and no standard tools for the process, even though sectors like manufacturing and retail already had mature pricing software.

He moved back to India in 2022, worked remotely for his old employer for a few months, then quit his Head of Pricing job to start PriceOps. The business began as a consulting firm, but the same pain points kept surfacing among SaaS companies and consultants, so he pivoted to building a product. He had saved enough to fund about a year of work.