Why we don't charge per rep

The default contract for B2B software is the seat. You add a person, you pay another fee. Headcount is the meter. The model made sense when software was a workspace — a place a person logged into to do their job — and the vendor’s cost scaled with the user.

That contract doesn’t fit how medical device commercial teams actually work, and it doesn’t fit what operations software actually does. So we built our pricing around territories and usage instead. Here’s the reasoning, the math, and what it costs.

The per-rep tax on hiring

Per-rep pricing has one quiet assumption: every rep contributes the same value, so charging per rep is a fair proxy for the value the software delivers.

In medical devices, that assumption falls apart immediately.

Rep productivity inside a single territory often runs a 5x to 10x range between top and bottom performers. A senior rep in spine might do $4M a year; a junior rep in the same territory does $400K. Territories themselves vary even more — a high-density metro with three large IDNs and a teaching hospital will outperform a rural territory of community ASCs by an order of magnitude, regardless of who’s on the ground.

The variance isn’t a fixable management problem. It’s the structure of the industry. Surgeon relationships are sticky and slow to build. New territories take 12 to 18 months to produce. Some accounts are gettable, some aren’t. The reps doing $400K aren’t lazy — they’re early in ramp, working a smaller book, or covering a market segment that doesn’t generate the same case volume.

Per-rep pricing ignores all of it. It charges the same for the rep doing $4M and the rep doing $400K. The same for the senior closer and the territory manager who’s still learning the surgeons’ names. The same for the rep who lives in the OR and the trunk-stock manager who handles cases when the rep is off.

That’s not a pricing model. It’s a tax on having anyone in the field who isn’t already a top performer.

The work the software actually does

The other reason per-rep pricing fails: operations software doesn’t really serve the rep. It serves the company.

Think about what an ops automation platform does. It reads charge sheets, matches POs, posts invoices, tracks consignment, surfaces missing data. The work runs on behalf of the company’s revenue cycle, not on behalf of any individual rep. A rep submits a case from their phone, but the actual processing — the matching, the billing, the visibility — happens in the back office, the manufacturer’s ERP, and the partner relationships.

Charging per rep for that work is like charging per employee for your accounting system because employees occasionally interact with expense reports. The system serves the business; the people just provide inputs.

In medical devices specifically, the team generating the most events the software processes isn’t the rep at all. It’s the customer service inbox, the AR analyst chasing missing lots, the ops manager reconciling field transfers, the field service tech moving trays. Per-rep pricing forces a choice: limit access to keep cost down, or pay for everyone and absorb the markup. Most companies limit access. The rep is on the platform, but the trunk-stock manager, the ops coordinator, and the AR analyst aren’t — which means coordination work goes back to email, exactly where it started.

You wind up paying for the software and paying for the work the software was supposed to eliminate.

The vendor incentive problem

Per-rep pricing also points the vendor in the wrong direction.

When the vendor’s revenue scales with your headcount, the vendor wins when you hire — whether or not those hires actually produce. The renewal conversation becomes “let’s add seats” instead of “let’s expand outcomes.” The QBR slides count active users instead of cases automated or days-to-cash improved.

The misalignment compounds during a stretch year. Every growing manufacturer goes through one — a hiring push to capture a market opening, a new product launch that needs field coverage, a distributor expansion that doubles rep count overnight. The vendor’s invoice grows on the same curve as headcount. The customer’s revenue lags 12 months behind. The platform isn’t doing more work; the bill just got bigger.

This isn’t a bad-vendor problem. It’s structural. Anyone selling per-rep is incentivized to recommend more reps. They’re not malicious — their P&L just won’t let them tell you otherwise.

Territory and usage

We chose two units that move with the business.

A territory is whatever revenue-bearing unit your company already organizes around — a geographic region, an account-based book, or a contracted distribution agency. For manufacturers selling through independent distributors, the agency is the territory: you contract with them, they cover a market, your P&L tracks them as a single line. Your finance team already measures these units. Your sales leadership already plans against them. Your ops team already allocates inventory to them. Pricing on territories means cost lands on the parts of the business the platform actually covers — and you can put as many people as you want inside each one, whether they’re your reps or the agency’s.

Usage is the operational work the platform performs: POs processed, cases coordinated, charge sheets read, invoices posted. This is the work that creates value. When usage goes up, the platform is doing more — and that’s exactly when paying more makes sense.

The combination matters. Territories alone would mean a small territory with high volume pays the same as a small territory that’s barely active. Usage alone would penalize companies for digitizing more of their workflow. Together, they track the two things that matter: what the business is structured around and what the software actually did.

The customer math

Take a mid-size manufacturer running 30 territories with 75 reps, 8 ops people, and a back office of 6. Call it 10,000 cases a year — typical for that footprint at average ortho case values.

On a per-rep model at $150/rep/month — what most of our direct comps charge — the manufacturer pays $135K a year just for reps. To bring the ops team and back office onto the same platform, they add another $25K. Total: ~$160K a year, billed regardless of what the platform actually did.

If the company hires 15 more reps next year for a market expansion that takes 12 months to produce, the bill goes up $27K immediately. The expansion doesn’t generate revenue for a year. The vendor still gets paid every month.

The same company on Deviceflow at $10 per case pays $100K a year for the 10,000 cases the platform actually processed. Everyone — reps, distributor agency reps, ops, back office, field service techs, trunk-stock managers — gets access at no marginal cost. That’s $60K less than the per-rep alternative in steady state.

When the company hires 15 reps for that same market expansion, the Deviceflow bill doesn’t move until the cases start flowing. If case volume rises from 10,000 to 10,500 during the ramp year, the bill goes up $5K — not $27K. When the new territory matures and case volume reaches 12,000, the bill is $120K, and by then the new revenue is paying for it. If the platform processes more, you pay more — and you’re paying for completed work, not for headcount that hasn’t produced yet.

Here’s how that math plays out across a few common shapes — a manufacturer at three points in a hiring cycle, plus a distributor agency above the $7M free tier:

The exact numbers vary by company. The structure is what matters: cost moves with the business, not with the org chart.

What this means for how you scale

If you’re growing, per-rep pricing punishes you twice. You pay more before the new hires produce, and you pay more for everyone you’d need to invite onto the platform to make those hires productive in the first place.

If you’re consolidating, per-rep pricing punishes you in a different way: you can’t reduce the bill without reducing access, which means the people left behind are doing more of the work that ended up back in the inbox.

The contract we want with our customers is simpler than that. As your operations get bigger, our bill gets bigger. As the platform processes more of the work, you pay for more of the work. When the business is flat, the bill is flat. When you hire, you hire — the software invoice has nothing to say about it.

That’s why we don’t charge per rep. The seat was never the right unit for medical device operations. The territory and the work — those are the units the business actually runs on.