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amoorthytoday at 12:38 AM2 repliesview on HN

"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]"

I disagree with this.

On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresholds.

On features vs. outcomes, the latter is hard to define and measure in many industries. In marketing SaaS, which I know well, you can't often tell what outcome to expect. You have to try a lot of ideas and some will hit. No way a SaaS vendor can guarantee that.


Replies

bensyversontoday at 2:43 AM

The argument against seat pricing is that companies will employ fewer people in general. So a 45 person company paying for 10 seats will become a 7 person company paying for one seat.

Not sure I agree with this train of thought, but a SaaS CEO made this exact argument to me last week.

evanmorantoday at 1:40 AM

I’d add that token pricing doesn’t work for anyone but the frontier models. Everything else will be commodified. So Opus can charge us top prices per token until a lower (or local) model hits parity and then price goes to zero.