u/SeaAnybody8119

Co-founder at a value & pricing intelligence company. We spend a lot of time thinking about how B2B SaaS companies prove value in deals -- so I went through 30 vendor ROI calculators to see how they'd hold up when a CFO actually asks questions.

Built a taxonomy of what I found.

Six categories:

- Math in a Box -- you put in your numbers, it does arithmetic. No assumptions injected. Rare but honest.

- Vendor Benchmark Injector -- pre-loaded improvement rates from "industry data" the vendor owns. The most common type.

- Commissioned Research Tool -- built on Forrester or IDC TEI studies. The disclaimers are nearly identical across every vendor that uses them.

- Spend Estimator -- converts headcount and time into dollars. Feels grounded. Usually isn't.

- Honest Comparison Tool -- buyer controls the assumptions. The output is defensible because they built it.

The core problem: most calculators pre-load improvement rates from vendor-owned data. When finance asks "what's your basis for 15% productivity improvement?" -- nobody has a good answer because the vendor set that number, not the buyer.

I graded all 30 on one question: who controls the assumptions?

A few highlights:

- Several Forrester TEI calculators use near-identical disclaimer language across completely different vendors

- One HR software calculator has 8 buyer-controlled sliders -- one of the most honest I found

- One calculator looks generic on the surface but reveals a more transparent framing in a pop-up -- undersells itself

Full breakdown with grades and named vendors: https://blog.valueiq.ai/p/your-roi-calculator-is-s-h-i-t

Has anyone else had a CFO challenge a number from one of these, or been on the other side trying to defend it?

Our stack has standards for basically everything. OpenAPI for APIs. ISO 4217 for currency. OAuth for identity. Now MCP and A2A for agents talking to each other. Every layer has an agreed-upon way to represent itself.

The one thing that has no standard is the thing every deal actually rests on: the economic value of what you're selling.

Think about where your value models live right now. A spreadsheet someone built for one deal. A slide in a consultant's deck. The heads of the two or three people on the team who can actually articulate the ROI story. None of it is shareable, none of it is auditable, and none of it travels from deal close to renewal to the next prospect. Every deal starts from zero.

You see the cost of this constantly:

- Economic buyer asks, "what's the ROI?" and the rep improvises

- Deal stalls at finance because there's no credible business case

- Renewal defaults to discounting because nobody documented what was actually delivered

And it's about to get worse, not better. As AI buying agents start screening vendors, they don't read PDFs or sit through a value-selling pitch. They evaluate structured data. A value model trapped in a spreadsheet is invisible to them.

So we put together an open spec for it: JSON schemas for value models and pricing models, Apache 2.0, governed on GitHub. The idea is a common, machine-readable way to declare value drivers, pricing equations, and confidence intervals that any system (or agent) can read without translation. It's free, and the schemas are live.

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧.

If you want to poke at the schemas: thevalueproject.org