By Geoff McDonald, CEO, Ambassador
Two weeks ago I wrote that proof got paid and promises got punished. The two weeks since then delivered the receipts, and they were bigger than I expected.
Here is the short version. The market stopped pricing software on growth stories and started pricing it on customer economics. Retention, expansion, and the ability to prove value are now the valuation. And the pressure point is not churn. It is expansion. This post walks through the data, then through the three things we are building for exactly this moment: Hierarchy, Ledgers, and the new Consumption experience.
Five numbers from the last two weeks tell the whole story.
Read those together and the pattern is unmistakable. Logos are not the problem. Growth inside the account is. And the companies finding that growth are the ones that meter value and charge for it, which is precisely what consumption pricing does.
Follow the money in August and it lands after the sale. Nielsen agreed to pay $2.15 billion for DoubleVerify to prove ad spend reaches real people. ChurnZero shipped an AI agent whose entire job is explaining why customers leave. Klaviyo acquired an AI customer success company and made its founder Chief Product Officer.
Our own enterprise conversations this month confirm it from the buyer's side. The largest organizations we talk to are reorganizing their top initiatives around customer value management, and the mandate comes down to four metrics: average revenue per user, churn, share of wallet, and NPS. Optimize the base you have before you chase the base you want.
If that is the new scorecard, your operating stack needs three things it probably does not have today: control over who can act on which customers, clarity on where every dollar of customer investment sits, and a billing model that scales with the value you receive instead of the seats you bought. That is our release schedule right now, almost line for line.
Hierarchy is in final testing now, deployed under a feature flag, and rolling out to accounts over the coming weeks. It adds a true org chart to Ambassador. You create organizational units, nest them to match your actual structure, and assign users and objects to them. Segments, programs, campaigns, and contacts become visible only to the teams they belong to, enforced all the way down to the API.
The details matter here. Moving or deleting a unit shows you exactly which objects and users are affected before you confirm. Campaigns inherit the scope of their parent program, so a regional team cannot accidentally publish outside its lane. CSV imports check whether a contact already belongs to a unit you cannot see and route the conflict instead of silently duplicating it.
This is the foundation for multi-brand and multi-line-of-business support inside one instance, and it opens the door to multicurrency. If the market is going to price you on how well you manage your customer base, the first requirement is that the right people, and only the right people, can touch each part of it.
Two more pieces are in design right now, and the previews our team walked through this week are close to final.
Ledgers turns the Finance section into something that behaves like your banking app. Vaults with live balances. In-app funding and transfers between vaults. A full transaction history with opening and closing balances, holds you can review, scheduled funding, and auto top-up. Today, funding a rewards program too often means wiring money and then asking support whether it arrived. The design goal is simple: you should never have to ask where your money is.
The Consumption experience is the customer-facing side of the pricing model this market is rewarding. A usage and limits page shows your credit balance, consumption by day and by outcome, and budgets you can set by organizational unit, role, person, program, or campaign. HiroAI surfaces insights directly on the page, flagging quick wins and budget risks before they become tickets. It plugs into Hierarchy, so credit budgets follow the same org structure as everything else.
Neither of these is live yet. Both are in design, and I am sharing them because building in the open is the honest version of a roadmap. Hierarchy arrives first. Ledgers and Consumption follow.
Every number at the top of this post is the market repricing software on one question: do your customers stay, expand, and prove their value? Hierarchy gives you control of the base. Ledgers gives you clarity on every dollar you invest in it. Consumption aligns what you pay with what you actually receive, the exact correction monday.com's numbers say the market wants.
We built the platform around the customer lifecycle before the market demanded it. This month, the market started demanding it.
Grow. Keep. Prove.
Ambassador is The Customer Lifecycle Operating System, orchestrated by HiroAI. It gives revenue teams the control, clarity, and consumption model the repriced software market now demands. See how it works.