Who this is for: Companies sitting on valuable proprietary data with no product wrapped around it - or SaaS teams whose pricing and access model is doing the selling badly.

Stears had some of the best economic data on African markets anywhere. Investors and banks wanted it. Delivery was spreadsheets over email, one relationship at a time, uncapped by anything except the team's hours. The design brief was to build the product layer that would let the data sell without a person in the loop.

Designed the full monetisation platform: tiered access, dataset previews, flexible export, usage analytics and billing.

The central design problem was the preview. An institutional buyer will not pay for data they cannot inspect, and you cannot show them enough to make buying unnecessary. I designed previews that expose structure, coverage and recency - enough to prove rigour - while withholding the values themselves.

Designed the tiering around how institutions actually procure: a decision-maker who needs to justify the spend internally, and an analyst who will actually use it. Two different people, two different surfaces, one purchase.

Every screen was reviewed against a single question: what does a CFO need to see before they sign this off?

Designed the self-serve path so smaller buyers could transact without a sales conversation, and the enterprise path so larger buyers could get to a quote quickly.

I designed a complete data monetization SaaS platform where institutional clients could discover, preview, purchase, and download African economic datasets. I created tiered subscription access (free preview, standard, premium, enterprise) that allowed clients to explore before committing, built data preview interfaces so buyers could see sample data before purchasing, designed flexible export options (CSV, JSON, Excel, API access), integrated billing and subscription management, added usage analytics so clients could track their data consumption, and created a discovery interface with search, filters, and recommendations. The platform needed to feel professional enough for Morgan Stanley while remaining accessible to smaller African investment firms.

Three months. Interviewed institutional buyers directly rather than relying on internal assumptions about what they wanted, then designed against their procurement process rather than against a generic SaaS pricing pattern.

15 institutional clients signed within eight months, without a dedicated sales team

85+ datasets made available for purchase

Conversion rate reported at 14%

Became a primary revenue driver for the business

Figma

SaaS architecture

Pricing and packaging UX

Data product design

Productising a dataset or designing a monetisation layer for a SaaS product. Typically 4–6 weeks: buyer research, tiering and packaging model, preview and paywall design, billing and self-serve flows.

Typical investment: $5,500 – $8,000. Pricing-and-packaging design sprint alone: $2,500.