How Sesame HR Transformed from Excel-Based Billing to Modular Packaging at Scale

The Challenge

When Spreadsheets Stop Scaling

Sesame HR's story begins where many fast-growing SaaS companies find themselves: trapped by their own success. After nearly a decade of building from a simple time-tracking tool into a comprehensive HR platform, it was serving 12,000 customers across multiple countries. But its billing infrastructure hadn't evolved alongside its ambitions.

"We have grown a lot in the last two, three years," explains Rafel Soriano, Head of Data at Sesame HR. "And we began to understand that each customer needed different features... and not every customer wanted to buy the same features from us." The challenge wasn't just about scale – it was about flexibility.

Enterprise clients were knocking on Sesame’s door with complex needs. These weren't small businesses looking for a simple solution. They were companies running five different HR applications that wanted to consolidate everything into one platform. But they didn't want to pay for a fixed bundle of 20 features when they only needed time tracking initially, with plans to add payroll six months later.

Silvia Valero Verche, Chief of Product Expansion, remembers the frustration: "Our sales team had to offer a set plan, and as Rafel said, to have the entitlements and to be able to make these custom bundles... it was very difficult on sales."

The Excel-based billing system that had served them well in the early days had become their biggest bottleneck. Price increases? Terrifying. "We were afraid of it because it was difficult to control, to manage the upgrade for 3,000 customers in Excel," Valero recalls. The knowledge about customer agreements, pricing structures, and billing details lived in spreadsheets, creating a dangerous single point of failure.

The Solution

The Strategic Shift to Modular Thinking

Rather than continuing to patch their makeshift system, Sesame HR decided on a fundamental transformation. It would move to a truly modular packaging approach, but it would require nailing its technical infrastructure.

The journey happened in stages. After implementing Chargebee, Sesame HR leveraged the product catalog functionality, enabling them to handle different plans with various currencies and billing periods simultaneously. This move alone had "a really huge impact on our business," according to Soriano.

But the real game-changer came with implementing Chargebee's entitlement management. "Most of the logic of the payment was on our backend, and we wanted to move that to Chargebee because it was a lot easier," Valero explains. Sesame HR started with a manual approach, testing the waters. The sales team would create custom plans, and the billing team would manually configure the entitlements for each client.

This testing phase proved the concept. Soon, they were building automated add-ons with entitlements, allowing customers to purchase additional features seamlessly. What had once required developer intervention was now self-service, a huge win.

The Results

The Ripple Effects of Flexible Pricing

The transformation touched every corner of the business. For the sales team, the change was liberating. They could finally engage with enterprise clients who had previously been out of reach. "We were set on the hundred employees, 250 employees tier," Valero notes. We wanted to get up on the tier to have the thousand, 2000-employee company."

The Customer Success team experienced perhaps the most dramatic shift. They evolved from being "based on the happiness of the client" to becoming key account managers with revenue objectives. "We've been able to create more of a key account management team in the Customer Success organization, which is in charge of upgrades," Valero explains. These teams now had objectives for upselling and were exceeding them.

The speed of change accelerated dramatically. Soriano estimates they can now "do things twice as fast as before." Most importantly, Sesame HR was no longer dependent on development teams for pricing changes. "Before implementing Chargebee, we had an idea that we needed to change a price or change some features, but we needed the development team to implement that directly in the database. Now we have an idea, we can change that to only a specific group of customers and test that."

Global Expansion Becomes Possible

International expansion presented its own set of challenges. When Sesame HR opened operations in Mexico, it discovered the complexity of local billing regulations. "In Mexico, they have different regulations for billings, and invoices must be signed differently," Valero explains.

International expansion became easier as Chargebee handled the complexity of different markets and payment methods. "When we expanded to Brazil, we needed to offer boleto payments. We set this up entirely through Chargebee, saving substantial development time," says Valero. She adds, "Multi-entity management became essential as we expanded globally. We needed to manage different regions effectively while maintaining consistent customer data.”

The multi-entity system in Chargebee allowed them to "divide our business into different countries, different markets." They could maintain all customers in one account while applying different rules for each country. Italy presented a different challenge—market pricing was lower than their Spanish headquarters' rates. Using price variants, they offered different pricing in Euros for the Italian market, "which helped us to unblock the country for the sales team."

Learning Through AI Pricing Experiments

The new system's flexibility allowed Sesame HR to experiment with innovative pricing approaches, particularly around AI features. Initially, they offered AI functionality at a fixed price. But as they observed customer behavior, they pivoted.

"We prefer that they use this feature for free, almost for free, and see the value of this AI integration with our product," Soriano explains. "We can charge for other things at other prices, but not upgrades."

This strategic decision to make AI features free, essentially a loss leader to drive engagement, demonstrated the power of agile pricing. As Valero puts it: "If anybody can have a ChatGPT account for free, why are we charging for AI at the beginning?"

Looking Forward

After implementing its modular packaging strategy, Sesame HR has transformed from a company constrained by billing complexity to one that uses pricing flexibility as a competitive advantage. They're now tackling Brazil's unique market requirements, confident in their ability to adapt quickly.

The transformation required more than new technology; it demanded a mindset shift across the entire organization. "We've learned the importance of continuously delivering value to drive customer engagement," reflects Valero. "Our modular approach now enables us to do exactly that by delivering value incrementally while building stronger, more profitable customer relationships."

The journey from Excel spreadsheets to sophisticated entitlement-based pricing solved technical problems while unlocking the company's ability to grow strategically, both domestically and internationally. For subscription businesses looking to scale, Sesame HR's story offers a roadmap: invest in infrastructure that enables flexibility, because the ability to adapt quickly determines survival.

Want to learn how modular packaging could transform your subscription business? Discover pricing strategies that scale with your growth and support global expansion.