The Forgotten 'S' in SaaS

The software industry has a name for what companies like mine sell. SaaS. Software as a Service. Almost everyone fixates on the first word, and the last one sits quietly at the end, mostly ignored. To me, that last word is the most important one, and it carries two meanings I try to honor at the same time.

The first is the one the term was built on. "As a Service" was meant to mark a real shift in how software works. You used to buy a program, own a copy, install it on your own machines, and pay again every time you wanted the next version. A service is a different thing entirely. You do not purchase a product and own a slice of it. You subscribe to something living and whole that is hosted, maintained, and improved for you, and that is simply there whenever you need it, the way you subscribe to water or power instead of buying a reservoir. A service, by its nature, is the entire thing, delivered continuously. That was the promise sitting inside the name.

The second meaning is the older, human one. Service is how you treat the people who rely on you. It is answering the phone, and answering on a Sunday.

I am not willing to let go of either. Let me show you what I mean with something that happened a few days ago.

On a Sunday morning, the general manager of a club we had recently started working with sent me a question on behalf of his board. They wanted to know whether our software could track a guest across the entire club, so they could catch the same guest coming in with three different members in a single month and quietly slipping past the guest limit. It is a real problem at a lot of clubs. A member invites a guest, another member invites the same guest, it's difficult to keep a combined count, and over time the guest is enjoying the club without ever joining it. Why should they?

I wrote him back that same Sunday morning. The honest answer was: not yet. No client had asked us for that exact capability before, so we had not built it. But the moment his team explained what they needed and why, I could see the value immediately. So my answer was not no. It was this: not yet, and because you are the club requesting it, you get to help shape how it works, you will not pay a dollar more for it, and neither will any other club on our platform.

Look at everything packed into that small exchange. A reply on a Sunday. A real answer instead of a brush-off. A promise that a good idea would cost the club nothing. That is the word "service" doing both of its jobs at once, and it is worth pulling the two apart.

The first kind of service: you get the whole platform

If you take the word seriously, the conclusion is simple. When you subscribe to a service, you get the service. The whole thing. Not a starter tier with the useful parts locked away. Not a base price plus a list of add-ons you evaluate one at a time, wondering at every renewal whether you really need the module that does the thing you assumed the software was supposed to do in the first place. That is how a product company sells you a product. It is not what "as a Service" was meant to mean.

Many software companies have quietly drifted back toward that older product model anyway. Everything is a module, and every module carries its own price. I will be fair to them: it is a smart business model, and it reads well on a spreadsheet. But I have sat across the table from enough club leaders to know how it feels from the other side. It feels like being nickel-and-dimed. It feels like every good idea arrives with an invoice stapled to it. Worst of all, it puts a club in the strange position of weighing whether to pay for something that would obviously help its members, simply because a vendor decided to package it as an upgrade.

So we do not. Over the years we have added a great deal to GroupValet. AI feedback analysis. AI-assisted content moderation. Bookings and reservations. And recently, a personalized golf scoring system. Every existing client received all of it. We did not send a single one of them a new invoice, and we did not raise anyone's rate to cover it. They were GroupValet customers, so they were entitled to GroupValet. All of it. If you want the full picture of everything that now lives under one roof, it's laid out in What GroupValet Does.

I will go a step further, because it is the part I am proudest of. To this day, we have long-time clients still paying the beta rate they signed up at years ago. Our price sheet has gone up over time, but only ever for new clients. Once a club signs with us, their rate has never moved.

The honest part about price

I cannot promise the number on our price sheet will stay frozen forever. Software costs real money to build, run, and support, and there may come a day when the math calls for an adjustment we have not needed yet.

But here is the commitment that does not move, whatever the number happens to be. One rate. Everything included. No a la carte menu, no premium feature tier, no surprise line items at renewal. You will always know exactly what you are paying, and you will always be paying for the whole platform, not a slice of it.

Why I would rather raise the price than break it into pieces

People sometimes ask how that stays sustainable as the platform grows. It is a fair question. We have plans to add substantial new features over the next two years. When the capabilities we have planned land, the conventional move would be to spin them off as paid modules and sell them separately.

I would rather not. If keeping the platform whole ever became genuinely unsustainable, my strong preference would be to raise the price for new customers rather than start carving GroupValet into pieces and charging for each one. The moment you break a platform into modules, you change the relationship. The club stops feeling like a member with the run of the place and starts feeling like a shopper being upsold at the register. I would rather charge a fair, honest, all-in number than nickel-and-dime the people who trust us. Modules also make coding harder, and therefore more expensive, since each module has to be built to work with every other combination of modules, or completely on its own.

The second kind of service: actually taking care of people

That brings me to the other meaning of the word, the one the software industry tends to forget entirely.

Service, in the sense a club understands it, is not a pricing model. It is answering on a Sunday. It is picking up the phone. It is training your staff and your members until they are comfortable, then staying available when they have a question six months later. It is treating a guest-tracking request not as a support ticket to close but as a chance to make a club's life easier. None of that shows up on a feature list, and all of it is the reason people stay.

I have written before about how small points of friction quietly erode trust between a club and the people it serves, in When Customer Service Creates Friction Instead of Trust. The same idea applies to a software company and its clients. Every slow reply, every "that is not included in your plan," every handoff to a different department teaches a customer that they are on their own. I would rather teach them the opposite.

So onboarding, training for staff and members, support, and maintenance are all included in that one rate. But included is the floor, not the point. The point is that when a club reaches out, a real person who knows their setup answers, and answers quickly. That is the part of this business I care about most, and it is the part no amount of software can replace.

The whole place is yours

I think about our software the way a good club thinks about its members. You do not hand someone a membership and then charge them to sit on the patio, or bill them by the hour for the reading room. The whole place is theirs. And while they are there, you take care of them. Those two things together, the access and the care, are what make a club feel like a club and not a transaction.

That is what the forgotten word in our industry's name is supposed to mean. Software is the easy part. The service, in both senses, is the whole point.

So when that club gets its guest-tracking feature in a few weeks, every other club on the platform will receive it too, at no charge, because one of their peers had a good idea and we were lucky enough to be asked on a Sunday morning. That is not a giveaway, and it is not just good support. It is simply what the word service is supposed to mean.

Frequently asked questions

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