How AI is rewriting the rules of SaaS pricing (www.businessinsider.com)

AI is rewriting SaaS pricing by shifting value from seat-based access to outcome-driven usage. The piece argues that traditional per-seat annual contracts break down when AI automates work—generating responses, resolving tickets, or translating content without proportional human interaction—creating a misalignment where customers either overpay for access or extract outsized value that isn’t reflected in price. Usage-based pricing (UBP), once confined to infrastructure vendors like AWS and Twilio, is moving up the stack because it better maps revenue to measurable outcomes and enables faster monetization of new AI features. Practically, this means adopting hybrid models (seats for collaboration, per-request or per-agent billing for AI), adding an abstraction layer (tokens/credits/usage packs) to align metered activity with customer-valued metrics, and treating billing UX as a core product: real-time dashboards, spend controls, and alerts. Technical implications include building robust metering and billing systems, cross-functional ownership across product, engineering and finance, and prioritizing simple, transparent metrics over brittle precision to maintain trust. The transition is framed as a product transformation—start with high-impact AI features, iterate quickly, and make billing and observability part of the customer experience.