"Billing either builds trust or it breaks trust." That's @Fynn Glover, CEO of Schematic, and I think he's spot on. Yesterday, we co-hosted an excellent Office Hours session, where several of you shared your own experiences (and challenges) of shifting to usage-based pricing. My biggest takeaway is that most teams still define Trust as Visibility (e.g., being able to see usage). Fynn views Trust as a combination of Visibility and Governance (e.g., customers being able to do something to control usage proactively). Fynn believes (and I agree) that in the age of agents, governance will become a requirement for any SaaS & AI tool to prevent excessive agent usage. He shared four things you can actually do to provide the full picture of Trust: 1. Turn the feature and spend cap ON by default. Fynn's favorite example of a company that does this well is Supabase. On paid tiers, they turn AI features on by default, but also turn a default spend cap on by default. When a user hits their covered limit, they gracefully degrade performance with clear alerting instead of a wall. This is a great example of protecting customers by handing over the controls rather than withholding the product. 2. Ship the controls before the meter. During Office Hours, one pricing leader discussed a recent AI product launch that received pushback from customers because governance requirements weren’t ready to go at launch. By giving admins permission controls 30 days before a credit-consuming feature goes GA, it allows them to plan usage accordingly, or turn the feature off to avoid surprises. 3. Talk openly about overages and throttling preferences. This one is psychological, not technical. Some customers want you to cut them off before a runaway bill. Others would rather eat the overage than break a workflow. The only wrong answer is not having asked. If you're not throttling, you both need to be aligned on what that means for the invoice.

Howdy pricing people! Next week we've got a great session planned. I’ll be joined by Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt (CEO, Willingness to Pay) and Manu Mehra (Strategic Deal Pricing, Databricks) to talk about selling and renewing 7-figure deals. Enterprise has always been its own animal. Custom terms, committed spend, discounts that get negotiated line by line. But usage-based pricing and AI have increased the complexity. You're committing to a number for consumption nobody can predict, on a product that keeps changing underneath the contract. Between Manu and Ulrik, you’ll get both sides of the equation: Ulrik has spent years building these deal structures with vendors, while Manu has spent years running strategic deal pricing at Google Cloud and Databricks. A few things we're going to dig into: - How do you structure commit and ramp when the usage forecast is uncertain? - When and how should you discount? - How is AI showing up in enterprise agreements right now? This is a topic I get asked about a lot and almost nobody writes about it, so I'm glad we're finally doing it. Details below: Thursday, September 3rd @ 11:00 AM EST Register here 👉 https://luma.com/8xcyvtu4 Hope to see you there! Rob

Anyone have any guidance on pricing agentic marketing saas products. I'm thinking credit based plans with the ability to buy additional credits to support project needs.

I'd like to hear about people's experience of running tests on agentic workflows for the purpose of observing cost per flow and variables that drive cost. Which observation layers have you used? How have you run tests? What sort of sample size is needed to lock down a distribution with suitable confidence level? How much variance did you then bake into cost models for execution?

Howdy pricing people! @Fynn Glover, CEO of Schematic, is back for another session to talk about the part of usage-based pricing nobody talks about enough: trust. Schematic powers entitlements and metering for a lot of companies shipping UBP and hybrid models, so Fynn has a clear view of what teams actually build versus what they promise the customer at signature. Usually there's a gap, and it shows up at renewal. A few things we're going to dig into: - What buyers need to see before they'll commit to a usage-based contract - Where guardrails build trust vs. where they cap your own expansion revenue - Why visibility, spend controls, and admin have gone from nice-to-have to tablestakes This is the biggest objection I get from folks mid-migration to UBP, so I'm glad we're finally doing a full session on it. Details below: Thursday, 8/27 @ 12pm EST Register here 👉 https://luma.com/5c5lr4cz Hope to see you there! Rob