The Great Repricing: Why Every SaaS Vendor Is Moving to Consumption
Seats were predictable. Credits are not. The industry's shift to metered billing is a transfer of forecasting risk onto you.
Devon Okoye
Editor at Large
There's a quiet consensus forming in SaaS pricing meetings: the per-seat model has run its course. AI features don't have a natural per-seat cost, so vendors are reaching for credits, tokens and consumption units instead.
The pitch is fairness. The reality is a transfer of forecasting risk. A seat is a knowable annual number. A credit is a behaviour — and behaviour is exactly what you can't put in a budget line with confidence.
What this means for SAM
Our discipline was built for counting things. Consumption billing asks us to govern behaviour: tagging hygiene, job scheduling, auto-suspend, rate limits. That's closer to FinOps than traditional license management.
The teams that win the next three years will be the ones that instrument usage before the vendor's meter becomes the only source of truth.