Pricing31 August 2026 · 2 min read · Savina Bansal
Feature gates tax small teams. Usage-based pricing does not.
Switching a feature on for one more customer costs a vendor almost nothing. Charging for it anyway locks small businesses out of the tooling they need most.
Building the platform this article is about
Open almost any software pricing page and the useful things are on the expensive plan. Automation is one tier up. The integrations are two tiers up. Anything genuinely powerful is on the plan called Enterprise, priced by conversation.
The effect is easy to miss because it is so familiar: the businesses that would gain most from good tooling are the ones structurally prevented from having it. A ten-person company does not need less automation than a thousand-person company. It needs more, because it has fewer people to absorb the work by hand.
A gate charges for permission, not for cost
When a vendor switches a feature on for one more customer, it costs them almost nothing. The chatbot builder is already written. The API already exists. Enabling it consumes no extra engineering and no capacity that scales with the checkbox.
So a feature gate is not recovering a cost. It is charging for permission to use something that already exists and is already running.
Usage is different. Messages, storage, compute and AI replies genuinely scale with the customer, and it is fair that the bill scales with them. Charge for what costs you something. Do not charge for unlocking a checkbox.
Infrastructure settled this long ago
Nobody was ever told object storage was on the enterprise plan. AWS charges for what you store and move. Twilio is usage-based across its products, with no monthly platform fee and no tier that hides the messaging API from a small account. Stripe takes a percentage of what you process, and a business taking its first payment integrates the same API as one processing crores.
It is much of why two people in a room can build on the same infrastructure as an incumbent. Application software went the other way and kept the ladder.
What we did at Ohanvi
We build WhatsApp Business API software at ohanvi.com, and every plan carries every feature — broadcasts, the chatbot builder, the shared team inbox, the CRM, Shopify workflows, AI replies, social posting and email — including the plan that costs ₹0 a month. Included volume, how many people can sign in and how fast support answers do vary between plans. Features do not.
You pay for what you send. Our smallest customers pay the highest percentage on each message, because they pay no monthly fee — a trade you can see before choosing, and they have the whole product while they decide.
That is the part worth arguing about. On a feature ladder, a small business pays a modest fee for a deliberately reduced product, and the automation it actually needed is three tiers up. Small companies should not have to become big before they are allowed good software.
