Headless SaaS
Headless SaaS sells Software with no App of its own: Customers and their Agents use it through the API, MCP server, SDK, and CLI.
Breaking changes ship only in a new Version.
The business
| Line | Default |
|---|---|
| Earns | usage |
| Typical Prices | $0.01 per call; $99 a month for 25,000 calls |
| First revenue on | A Demand Budget of $0 |
| Supply | digital: Agents do the work |
| Motions | b2d, b2b, b2a, b2a2b |
| One metric per state | Idea: Problem interviews; Building: Committed ICP members; Live: Outside paying Customers; Repeatable: Logo churn; Scale: Net revenue retention |
| Seed Plays | Agent registries, Launch sites, Community answers |
| Compounding Plays | Developer relations, Integration partners, Answer engine optimization |
| Offer | Price | Features | Limits | At its bound | On sale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pay as you go (pay-as-you-go) | $0.01 per call, billed monthly | Collection.query | None. | None. | Always |
Growth (growth) | $99 a month | Collection.export | Collection.query: 25,000 a calendar month | overage | Always |
An Entitlement bounded by a Limit has kind limit; one without has kind feature. The kind is computed, never set.
atBound | A call past the Limit |
|---|---|
overage | Allowed: each unit past the Limit is billed through the Meter. |
Offer.publish puts each Offer on every buy surface: checkout, paymentLink, pricingTable, portalEntry, mcpBuyTool, http402.
Adds
| Kind | Item | From |
|---|---|---|
| Built from | Dataset API | This template |
Wakes
Staffing
Floor
Controls
- Vulnerability management
- Deploy reconciliation
- Anomaly monitoring
- Incident handling
- Revert by query
- Breach notification
- Change approval
- Environment separation
- Capacity headroom
- Point-in-time recovery
- Processing definitions
- Input validation
- Purpose limitation
Builders
Next
Example
A Startup sells invoice parsing: a Customer posts a PDF and gets structured line items back at $0.01 a page. Accounting tools build it into their own Apps, and Agents call it over MCP.