Aspermont: from seat pricing to enterprise decision infrastructure

The thing I like about my experience with Aspermont is they are growing, and they had the ambition to work out how to get ahead, optimise value for their customers and transform their revenues.

They have been the trusted source of news and intelligence for global mining since 1835. Mining Journal, Mining Monthly, MiningNews.net. More than 4,000 corporate subscriptions in over 150 countries, and around a quarter of the Global Fortune 100 on the books. 39 straight quarters of growth. 100% net retention.

And a pricing model that still counted by the seat.

The board knew where it wanted to go and said it plainly: from selling content seats to selling enterprise decisions. What they didn’t have yet was hard evidence for how much enterprise value was already sitting inside a subscription still billed, and renewed, at the level of one seat.

Before I tested anything, I wanted to work out how intelligence moves through a mining company. It isn’t one person reading the news. It’s a chain. Someone watches the market, catches something, works out what it means, and passes it to whoever has to act on it. The people in that chain sit inside the customer, not inside Aspermont. One seat, feeding a lot of functions.

That is what I call decision infrastructure. Inside these companies there are people doing specific jobs to get better results. Watching a market. Screening a country. Sizing an asset. Each job is a point where intelligence gets used and turned into a decision. Map those points and you can see what the subscription is for.

There was a second thing I wanted to show them. Aspermont isn’t in the business of finding ore. Their customers already know the assets they are watching. What makes a decision, to pursue something, to walk away, to move before a competitor does, is a change in the friction around those assets. A jurisdiction gets less stable. A lease moves closer to expiry. Shipping costs shift and change the economics of a whole region. A government signals a policy change before it becomes law.

The opportunities these companies chase can be worth hundreds of millions, and they are hard to find. So the intelligence has to flow, from the person who catches the signal to the people who can act on it, while there is still time to move. That is a fresh pair of eyes on an opportunity the customer already owns.

Studying the jobs, and the ways people handle information, is what showed me the enterprise agreement was already there. It let me build a fingerprint: a way to spot an account running at enterprise scale while still being billed as a single seat. It doesn’t look at consumption, or who logs in to read what. It looks at the functional uses and the behaviours. What jobs is this account running through the subscription, and how far do they reach. It is a long way from counting seats.

So I ran a discovery sprint with their leadership to test it. A tightly focused set of in-depth interviews with their senior people, across ten global mining organisations, in April and May 2026. I put it to the people doing those jobs, and showed them their own work in a different light.

I wasn’t asking whether people liked the product. I was asking which decisions the subscription was informing, and who else in the business depended on it without anyone tracking it.

One subscription, one named reader, was feeding five separate calls. Whether to pursue, kill or accelerate a project. Whether to enter or exit a country. Whether to buy, sell or hold an asset. Spotting a competitor’s move early. Building commercial acumen across the leadership team.

That was the lightbulb. Once you see how many functions one seat touches, selling seats stops making sense. It caps what Aspermont can charge for, and it caps what the customer gets, because the price counts the reader while the intelligence runs the business.

That’s not a pricing problem you fix with a bigger invoice. It’s a pricing model built for a reader, sitting on top of an account already behaving like an enterprise customer.

The commercial team got the customer’s own words for the value. They lead with the decisions now, not the seat count. Same with prospects that look like the accounts in the study.

For the leadership, the number did one more thing. It gave them the confidence to move to enterprise agreements.

What happened since

In June 2026 they took it to the market. The finding led the update Aspermont put to the ASX: one seat reaching 5.4 functions on average, the five decisions behind it, and the Enterprise Agreement model built to capture them. It sits next to their targets of 10%+ subscriptions growth and 15%+ ARPU on the EA transition.

And the chair told me what it meant to them. Aspermont is moving from multiple brands and seat-based subscriptions to enterprise decision infrastructure, and my findings went into the report that lays that out. The chair said the work is critical to what they are trying to achieve, and that the insight, support and direction I bring are valued at board level.

Substribe runs customer and pricing discovery sprints for B2B information and media businesses.

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Written by Andy Burden with the Substribe Claude project.