# Justin Etkin

Justin Etkin works with Tropic and writes about software procurement, vendor negotiations, market pricing, and managing AI costs.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/justin-etkin/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justintropic
- LinkedIn followers: 7,754
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, procurement
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Justin Etkin is most useful for procurement and AI cost arguments backed by pricing evidence and negotiation examples.

- Best for: A B2B SaaS procurement platform planning co-marketing webinars or authored pieces on benchmarking and negotiation.
- Not for: A developer platform or cloud vendor seeking hands-on engineering cost-reduction walkthroughs, code, or labs.
- Check first: Ask for audience survey results or demographics covering target regions, seniority, and recent engagement figures.

### Takeaways

- Vendors price each customer, not the market.
- Snyk was quoted $30 per seat on renewal against a $10 market rate.
- Carta found an incremental 21% savings after a vendor stopped moving.

## Main ideas

- **Vendors price each customer, not the market**: Justin Etkin argues that software vendors do not have one public price; they have a price for each customer. Across the spend Tropic sees, one vendor's pricing can swing 200% from one customer to the next. A buyer's network may reveal what someone paid years ago, but not what the market is paying now. Chris Siwekk, who runs procurement at Snyk, says the world has changed: vendors repackage SKUs and add AI to renewals.
- **Negotiation judgment means knowing when to push and when to stop**: Justin Etkin separates two situations buyers often treat the same way: a vendor that has genuinely hit its limit, and a buyer that has only reached the edge of what it can see. Pushing in the first case wastes time and goodwill. Not pushing in the second leaves money on the table. Benchmark data can also show when to stop: at Snyk, procurement uses it to decide when a deal is already priced fairly. An hour spent squeezing that deal is an hour not spent on a vendor quoting three times the market rate.
- **AI spending needs procurement discipline, not a yearly renewal calendar**: Justin Etkin argues that buying AI has more in common with buying steel than with buying software. Software has run on a two-to-three-year renewal cycle; AI offers no such breathing room. Token spend moves daily, pricing changes every few months, and a model can be deprecated before the contract ends. Because tokens land in COGS, a price change from OpenAI or Anthropic can show up in gross margin, bringing finance into the room. Etkin reduces the recurring job to three questions: what are we consuming, what will we consume next quarter, and what should we be paying.
- **Procurement should connect usage, forecast, and price**: Justin Etkin's priority is for engineering to own usage, finance to own the forecast, and procurement to own the price, but almost nobody connects the three. Procurement already knows the vendors, the contracts, and where pricing is heading, positioning it to become the team finance and engineering call first whenever AI costs move. That's a larger role than a renewal calendar ever gave procurement.
- **Benchmarking works best as an always-on process**: Justin Etkin highlights procurement systems that continuously check themselves against market intelligence and internal standards, rather than looking at data once before a negotiation. They describe Collibra as having built this kind of system so the team can be proactive and avoid overpaying. At Snyk, benchmarking became a standard step in every purchase, and teams now bring deals to procurement because an outside number can confirm or challenge the proposed price.
- **Proprietary data is the strategic asset as AI commoditizes software**: Justin Etkin argues that it's a good time to offer a product built on a proprietary data asset. As AI commoditizes software more broadly, demand for Tropic's market intelligence is at a high point. It's a strategic bet on the data layer rather than on software features alone.

## Work to read

- [Software vendors don't have a price. They have a price for you.](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_software-vendors-dont-have-a-price-they-activity-7513216522929217536-_vE_)
- [Carta found 21% more savings after the vendor stopped moving](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_in-a-recent-deal-carta-was-able-to-find-activity-7508905971293790209-Biun)
- [Buying AI has more in common with buying steel than buying software](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_buying-ai-has-more-in-common-with-buying-activity-7513592651326283776-jwBR)
- [Vendor negotiations webinar with Collibra](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_wednesday-im-talking-vendor-negotiations-activity-7507878961608044544-8Hh_)
- [DPW Amsterdam takeaways](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_thats-a-wrap-on-dpw-amsterdam-a-few-take-aways-activity-7511440752040697857-S0TD)

## Brand relationships

- **Tropic** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Carta** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Snyk** (mention)

## Partnerships

Justin Etkin's public partnership work appears through Tropic's procurement content: co-hosted webinars and live sessions with procurement teams and community organizers, plus customer-story features built around disclosed negotiation outcomes. For a B2B SaaS procurement platform seeking a practitioner voice on AI and software vendor cost management, practical formats include a co-marketing webinar or authored piece with Justin Etkin and a named procurement counterpart, or a case-study feature with a real benchmark and negotiation result. Ask for an official sponsor policy, rate card, or partnership inquiry route.

## Alternatives

- David Campbell: A better choice for a campaign aimed at an audience seeking an operator's view of how AI is changing software pricing, headcount planning and ROI—and what it costs to run a procurement organization through that shift. Justin Etkin's posts show a public decision to cut 40 roles while moving from a services business to an AI-powered procurement solution, with the reasoning stated plainly. They also promote an event built around the live tension boards face: when to automate and when to hire. Choose this voice when the session is about structure and leadership—where AI belongs, where people still matter and how to move responsibly—and the audience is executives seeking a peer who has made the call, not a tactic.
- Russell Lester: A better choice when the buying decision is aimed at finance and the argument should run from vendor pricing behavior to budget control. Justin Etkin's posts examine a payments vendor's move to bundle previously separate services, adding up to 20 basis points to processing costs, and ask whether discount reductions, SKU consolidations and acquisitions reflect genuine product logic or revenue protection. They draw on prior CFO experience at a B2B payments company. Another post describes an AI vendor bill swinging from $2K one month to $20K the next, framing it as a faster version of the zombie renewal and naming the two contradictory mandates boards give CFOs: cut software costs and invest more in AI. Choose this voice when the task is helping finance leaders see why AI spend needs oversight and what to ask a vendor, rather than teaching procurement how to run a negotiation.
- Matt Barnard: A better choice when the audience is finance leadership and the task is AI spend visibility and the purchase process: knowing what is being consumed before the invoice arrives and designing approvals that do not turn one person into a bottleneck. Justin Etkin's posts open with the CFO question of the year—what our AI spend is and what to do about it—and report that the usual answer is more than expected, discovered too late to act on. Another traces the problem across company size: at 50 people, every software purchase passed through one person; at 500, a $50k commitment reached a corporate card before finance knew. Choose this voice when the campaign is about control at scale—routing low-risk requests automatically, flagging high-value contracts to the right person with context and running compliance checks inline—and the platform wants a buyer who has felt the problem from the finance seat.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/