AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models
venturebeat.com
AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models
1–3 of 3 posts
Re: AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models
#2No. Just because per seat pricing might create the incentive to limit offering productivity enhancements, doesn't mean that incentive won't be dwarfed by competitive pressures.
And it doesn't matter what you want, customers want to pay in ways that are easy, predictable and make sense to them. Devs can do the math to predict compute costs with Amazon. But hitting a typical SaaS customer with a surprise large AI Calc bill will be a huge problem.
Per seat pricing tracks to value for most customers, is predictable and will likely continue to be the preference for a very long while.
Re: AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models
#3No. Just because per seat pricing might create the incentive to limit offering productivity enhancements, doesn't mean that incentive won't be dwarfed by competitive pressures. And it doesn't matter what you want, customers want to pay in ways that are easy, predictable and make sense to them. Devs can do the math to predict compute costs with Amazon. But hitting a typical SaaS customer with a surprise large AI Calc…
Agreed on all points.
There are already plenty of per-seat licensing models that explicitly acknowledge bots - e.g. Perforce's "service users" (used for e.g. the heavy hitting CI build accounts that have more activity than dozens of engineers combined) which don't even count against seat limits. Per seat is just a way to charge roughly by organization size, which has some semi-linear correlation to SaaS usage, even if automation / "AI" adds a potentially large productivity or load multiplier.
Even if "AI" somehow breaks that assumption at some point, where one engineer can reasonably use 'infinite' resources, it's pretty easy to couch usage based pricing in the veneer of seat based pricing. Just apply rate limits per user - say, high enough to handle your 95th percentile customers - and offer "virtual seats" for the power users who want to increase their API rates, or require a higher tier "enterprise" accounts - just as existing SaaSes already do, complete with public documentation of some of their API limits right on the pricing page no less.