FDE Commercials Roundtable

​FDE Meetup: Pricing & Commercials

Pricing FDEs is still an unsolved problem. They're the most expensive people on the team, and no one agrees on how to charge for them without looking like a services business that investors mark down. Palantir made it work; commercial is now about 46% of their revenue, and OpenAI and Anthropic are building the same motion. This is a working session, not a set of talks. Come with one pricing or packaging decision you're stuck on and we'll go through them together.

What we'll cover:

• ​Packaging and pricing models. Bundling into ARR vs. a separate services line vs. a hybrid. T&M vs. fixed-fee SOW vs. outcome-based. When it makes sense to give the work away to land an account and charge later, and when it doesn't.

• ​Margins and the fundraising story. Why services-heavy revenue trades below software revenue, how you classify FDE cost (COGS vs. R&D) and what that does to your margins, and how to show a path back to software margins.

• ​Who owns the deal and how you measure it. Whether sales, CS, or the FDE lead owns the commercial relationship, how to structure engagements, and which numbers matter early: revenue per FDE, payback, and expansion you can tie to a deployment.

​We'll finish with a networking dinner.