05/09/2026
For years, the SaaS industry believed the ultimate goal of a data platform was to sell access to raw datasets.
That model is officially broken. 📉
If your SaaS is simply licensing raw data via APIs, you are assuming your customer has the tools, the infrastructure, and, most importantly, the data literacy to analyze it. You aren’t giving them a solution; you are giving them a homework assignment.
Drawing on over 20 years of experience spearheading customer-driven product design, Infragistics COO Jason Beres argues that the most successful SaaS platforms are making a fundamental shift: Moving from monetizing raw data to monetizing analytics.
It comes down to providing ingredients versus serving the actual answer:
🔴 Raw Data Monetization: You sell the ingredients. The user effort is high, and the economic value is captured by the buyer, not you. Your primary concern is just privacy and compliance.
🟢 Analytics Monetization: You do the heavy lifting upstream. You deliver the "answer" through embedded dashboards and predictive models. Because you are providing the insight, your brand, not just the data, is now part of the value proposition.
As Jason notes, monetizing analytics removes the data literacy barrier entirely. You stop hoping your customers can find the value and start delivering it directly in the platform UX.
In his latest article for Dataversity, Jason, a former Microsoft .NET MVP and author of several books on software development, breaks down how to capture a larger share of the economic benefit of your data.
Read the full breakdown here: https://www.dataversity.net/articles/monetizing-analytics-vs-monetizing-raw-data-whats-the-difference/
Are you selling ingredients, or are you actually serving the meal?
As organizations increasingly prioritize analytics capabilities, the value equation of monetizing data analytics becomes clearer.
