The €19 price point is killing European SaaS founders

There is a number that haunts European SaaS pricing pages, and that number is €19. It appears on roughly one in four B2B SaaS landing pages I audit. The founder picked it because Spotify is €9.99 and Notion was €8 and they wanted to feel "premium." They picked it intuitively, in an afternoon, while building the pricing page. It is almost always wrong.

Here is what I see when I look at the actual data from the eleven European SaaS companies I worked with last year. The companies that raised their starter tier from €19 to €39 lost approximately 8% of signups and gained roughly 105% in revenue per customer. The math is not subtle. The €19 customers churn at a higher rate, complain more, and refer fewer people, because €19 is the price point where buyers feel "this should be free" rather than "I am investing in a tool."

The honest reason European founders default to €19 is that they are afraid. American pricing culture has trained us all to believe undercutting wins, and that fear travels across the Atlantic in spite of the very different buyer behaviour on this side of it. European B2B buyers, especially the German, Dutch, and Nordic ones, are more suspicious of cheap software, not less. They read low pricing as low confidence.

What I tell every founder I work with on their first call: raise the starter price by 80-100% and see what happens for thirty days. The downside is one bad month. The upside is the company you actually wanted to build. Almost nobody does this on the first call. Most do it on the third or fourth, after we have run the math three times. The ones who do it sooner are the ones I see at €5M ARR two years later.