We stopped locking features behind upgrades

A shop owner emailed us last month asking whether the multi-agent decision room, the thing where several reasoning agents argue about a hard call, was a Growth-tier feature. It was, at the time. She ran one location. Under our own pricing table, she was not allowed to have it.

That question sat with me longer than it should have. She was a paying customer. Her business was not smaller because she had one shop instead of five. The feature was not more useful to a five-location business than a one-location one. We had drawn the line in the wrong place, because it was the easy line to draw, not the honest one.

The old logic

Most software companies price this way: base tier gets the basics, pay more, unlock more of the product. It works because it is simple to build and simple to sell. It also means a customer's access to real functionality depends on their willingness to keep paying more, not on whether the functionality fits how they actually run their business.

We had fallen into the same pattern without deciding to. Team Predictions, the multi-agent Decision Room, the governance and audit trail, all sat behind Growth or Scale, not because a single-location shop could not use them, but because that is where SaaS pricing conventionally puts things.

The line we should have drawn from day one

Our plans are supposed to scale with capacity. Starter is one location. Growth is two to five. Scale is six to twenty. That is the actual constraint that changes as a business grows, how many places you operate, how many people need a seat, how many live connectors you need running at once.

Whether you get a second opinion that argues both sides of a decision, or an audit trail of who did what, is not a capacity question. It is a "does this business need to make good decisions" question, and the answer is yes at every size.

So we moved them. The multi-agent Decision Room, Team Predictions, and the full governance and audit trail are now included on every paid Kauzio Pulse plan, including Starter. What still scales with tier is what should: the number of locations, how many people are on your account, how many live connectors sync automatically, and the level of support that comes with it.

What is left gated, and why

Two things are still tier-gated, and we think both are honest reasons rather than upsell reasons. Comparing locations side by side and moving stock between them only mean anything once you have more than one location, so they scale with the tier that actually gives you more than one. Root cause analysis, the deeper causal attribution work, is genuinely expensive to compute per business, so we reserve it for the plans that fund that cost. Everything else is not withheld from you because you have not paid enough. It is included because you are a customer.

Why this matters more than it sounds like it should

Pricing pages are usually the least examined part of a product. Nobody audits them the way they audit the code. Ours had drifted into locking things away for reasons that made sense to a spreadsheet and no sense to a shop owner running one location well. Fixing it was not a marketing decision. It was correcting a mistake.

If you are on Starter and something in your dashboard was greyed out last month that is not today, that is why.