Kyle Poyar has spent more than 15 years inside SaaS pricing strategy, going back to the on-prem-to-SaaS transition in 2010. We sat down to talk through his latest monetization report and what the data is telling him about how AI is rewriting the rulebook in real time.

For most of SaaS history, pricing was a known quantity. Per seat, maybe a platform fee, raise rates over time, jack them up once private equity shows up. Kyle’s been mapping the same playbook for 15 years and admits it was mostly boring.

AI broke it.

“AI products are very different from traditional software,” Kyle said. “AI is doing work on your behalf as opposed to being a platform for people to log in and do work. So products are more of a system of action as opposed to a system of record.”

That shift is forcing founders to rethink what they’re selling, and CFOs to rethink what they’re buying.

The headline number from Kyle’s report: about 2 in 5 software companies now run hybrid pricing. Hybrid pricing means a subscription base plus consumption layered on top, usually in the form of AI credits. That’s officially the most common model in SaaS.

29% sell AI credits or tokens today, up more than 100% from last year. Another 33% plan to introduce credits in the next 6 to 12 months. Two-thirds of software companies will have a credit model by next year.

Companies above $50M ARR are doing most of the moving here, well ahead of AI natives. GitHub announced credits launching in June. Figma rolled them out in March.

Microsoft might be the cleanest tell. Satya Nadella laid the strategy out on the last earnings call: shift from seat-based to seat plus consumption. For their customer service product, roughly 60% of customers are already buying usage-based AI credits on top of their seats.

The part most people missed: Microsoft is still selling seats. They’re just pretty arbitrary now. 

“Microsoft will still sell you seat licenses, but their  seats are essentially an entitlement to some consumption similar to your Claude Pro subscription,” Kyle explained. “People still like feeling like they’re buying a seat, feeling like there’s predictability.”

Microsoft figured out something most AI founders haven’t, which is that buyers will accept consumption pricing if the buying motion still looks like the seat model they recognize.

When Kyle asked companies what their pricing model would look like in three years, the answer split. Half expect hybrid. The next biggest bucket: outcome-based.

Outcome-based is the disruptive message. It tells the customer you stand behind your product, anchors pricing to business value instead of token spend, and gives sales a much cleaner story in a procurement room. Intercom’s Fin launched at 99 cents per resolution and has since expanded to 99 cents per outcome.

The catch is that it punishes vendors who can’t predict their own results and prove attribution to their customers. The moment outcomes hit the invoice, customers audit every line.

The most interesting data point came from one of Fin’s biggest competitors. Decagon offers two pricing options: outcome-based or a fixed price per conversation. Roughly 80% of their customers choose the predictable conversation model, even when the outcome deal looks better on paper. Most buyers want budget certainty more than they want the theoretical upside.

Customer service is a cost center in most enterprise budgets, and cost center managers are measured on predictability of spend more than on the percent of resolutions automated.

Hybrid pricing is the safe bet for the next 12 months. It lets you keep selling seats to procurement while growing account value through consumption, and given that two-thirds of software companies will have credits inside a year, the design work needs to start now.

Outcome-based pricing is a sales weapon more than a billing model. Even if you never charge by outcome, building your pitch around the outcomes your product drives forces clarity on what you actually do. It rewires customer success around revenue contribution, and it gives AEs something concrete to defend when procurement gets aggressive.

The comparison problem is the third piece. Buy 150,000 credits at one vendor and you might get 6,000 emails. At another, 150,000. Buyers can’t shop apples to apples, and most vendors are designing their credit systems to obscure that fact rather than solve it. The vendors who win this cycle will be the ones who teach buyers how to buy.

Kyle has the full report up at growthunhinged.com.

P.S. Want to catch Kyle live?

He's coming to New York on June 3rd to sit down with Brian Donohue and Aisling O'Reilly from Fin for a private afternoon session on what leading AI transformation looks like inside an established company. Followed by cocktails.

Senior GTM leaders only. The room is small and the list curated.

Want to learn from more Revenue Creators like Kyle? Join the RevGenius community and be part of the movement rewriting the GTM playbook.

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