Why We Don't Bill Per Case (and Why That Should Worry You About Vendors Who Do)
Case-count or per-submission billing was genuinely on the table early in Rectifia's pricing design - it's a common model in this category, and it's easier to price aggressively at the low end because it scales revenue with usage. We ruled it out deliberately, and it's worth explaining why, because the reasoning isn't really about margins. It's about what the incentive actually rewards.
The incentive problem, stated plainly
If a vendor's revenue increases every time an employee files a report, that vendor now has a quiet financial interest in report volume - and the easiest way to influence report volume, even unintentionally, is through product decisions that make reporting slightly less frictionless than it could be. Nobody has to consciously decide "let's make this harder to use." It shows up more subtly: a feature that would meaningfully improve reporting ease gets deprioritized because it might increase support cost per report, or a pricing tier structure quietly discourages a company from encouraging more reporting because it would trigger a higher band.
None of this requires bad faith. It's just what misaligned incentives do over time, slowly, in a hundred small product and roadmap decisions that individually seem reasonable.
Why this is more than a hypothetical for a compliance product specifically
In most SaaS categories, usage-based pricing is fine, even good - it aligns cost with value delivered. Workplace misconduct reporting is a genuine exception, because the "usage" being priced is an employee choosing to speak up about harassment, retaliation, or burnout. A pricing model that makes that choice more expensive for the employer, even indirectly, sits uncomfortably close to the exact suppression dynamic that whistleblower protection law exists to prevent.
There's also a legal-discoverability angle worth naming: if a company is ever asked, in litigation or regulatory review, whether its reporting vendor had any financial interest in report volume, "no, we pay a flat rate regardless of how many people report" is a materially better answer than having to explain a per-case fee structure to opposing counsel.
Why headcount-based billing is the aligned alternative
Employee headcount is a number that doesn't move based on employee behavior. It changes when the company hires or shrinks - a decision the employer makes, not a decision an individual employee makes by choosing to report or stay silent. Pricing on headcount means Rectifia's revenue is completely indifferent to whether report volume goes up or down in a given year, which is exactly the indifference a compliance vendor should have.
It's also the same logic regulatory frameworks already use. The EU Whistleblower Directive scopes its own obligations by employee headcount, not by report volume - the law itself treats headcount as the meaningful unit of organizational scale for this purpose. Pricing the same way isn't a coincidence; it's aligning the business model with how the underlying obligation is actually structured.
What to ask a vendor who bills per case
Not "why do you price this way" - most will have a reasonable-sounding answer about aligning cost with usage. Ask instead: "if our report volume doubled next year because our reporting culture improved, what would that do to our bill, and does that concern you the way it concerns me?" The answer tells you whether the incentive problem has been thought through, or just priced around.