There's a version of subscription software that makes perfect sense.
The product does something for you continuously. Email goes out every month. Data syncs every day. Insights update in real time. The value is ongoing, the delivery is ongoing, and the subscription reflects that.
There's another version of subscription software where the logic is shakier.
You buy a tool. You use it to build something — a report, a strategy, a framework. You get what you need. Then you pay again next month for... the ability to do it again if you want to. The product exists. You have it. But the subscription keeps going because that's the model.
The difference is whether the ongoing payment reflects ongoing value delivery or just ongoing access.
This distinction matters for how you think about your own pricing model and your own expansion motion.
The most defensible subscriptions are the ones where the customer is getting something new every month — not just access to something they could have gotten last month. New data. New insights. New capabilities. New outcomes. The product keeps working on their behalf and the subscription reflects that work.
The expansion equivalent is the same principle. The most durable expansion revenue comes from ongoing delivery, not one-time upgrades. A customer who upgrades their tier has paid more. A customer who buys a managed service receives something every month and their ongoing payment reflects ongoing delivery.
This is why the expansion plays that embed your team in the customer's operation are so powerful — they're literally delivering ongoing value that justifies the ongoing payment. Every month your CSM shows up, your engineers ship something, your training team runs a session — that's monthly value delivery. The subscription makes sense.
When you're designing your expansion motion, ask the question for each offering: is this a one-time upgrade or an ongoing delivery? Both are valid. But the ones that are ongoing delivery are the ones that compound LTV over time, because they're both expansion revenue and retention mechanisms simultaneously.
The goal is to build an expansion motion where, over the lifetime of a customer, more and more of their payment reflects ongoing value delivery rather than just ongoing access. That's the version of land and expand that produces the NRR numbers that make investors stare at spreadsheets in disbelief.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.