StoryQuadrant field note · November 2026
Software vendors are moving from seats to credits and outcomes faster than buyers can forecast the bill. Most have landed on a hybrid: a seat or platform fee as the floor, with AI metered on top.
Compiled 4 November 2026 from analyst surveys, company filings and vendor announcements. Survey series use different samples and are shown separately, not joined into one trend.
SaaS companies using usage-based pricing, 2022
Up from — in 2020. OpenView survey of private SaaS companies.
Companies with hybrid as their main model, 2025
From — a year earlier, while seat-based fell to —. Growth Unhinged survey.
Growth in companies pricing with credits, 2025
From — to — of the — companies PricingSaaS tracks.
IT leaders hit by unexpected consumption or AI charges
Zylo SaaS Management Index, January 2026.
Enterprise buyers already paying on outcomes, 2026
Up from — in late 2024. Futurum buyer survey.
Usage-based pricing went from a minority model to the majority in three years, then settled into hybrids. Pure seat pricing is now the least common primary model in the surveys that track it.
OpenView State of Usage-Based Pricing. Private SaaS companies; using, not testing. No edition after 2022.
Growth Unhinged State of B2B Monetization 2025, a survey of software and AI companies. The earlier figure is respondents' recall of twelve months before.
ICONIQ State of AI 2025, a survey of executives at companies building AI products. Share by primary pricing model.
Paying for a result rather than a seat or a call is growing steadily from a small base, not yet fast. Buyers report more use of it each half year, and vendors expect it to become common within a few years, but few have made it their main model. Where it has taken hold is AI customer service, priced per resolved conversation.
Futurum enterprise software decision maker surveys, second half of 2024 and first half of 2026.
Growth Unhinged State of B2B Monetization 2025. Share with outcome-based as their main model, and share expecting to use it by 2028.
From the pricing changes tracked below. Almost all are AI agents for customer service.
| Date | Vendor | What is charged |
|---|
The large platforms have changed AI pricing more than once each. Salesforce went from per conversation to credits to per seat to a capped enterprise licence in about a year. Customer service is where per-outcome pricing has taken hold first.
Dates are announcement or effective dates as reported; month shown.
| Date | Vendor | Change | Model |
|---|
What the public evidence tells us about consumption pricing. Each vendor is judged on four public signals: whether it charges for a unit the buyer already counts, whether the price has held, whether the metered line is growing faster than the business around it, and whether customers have pushed back. These are inferences from published figures, not customer data.
How vendors were chosen. A vendor is included when it has made a visible move towards consumption or outcome pricing and has published something that shows whether it is selling: revenue for the metered product, retention, growth in the metered line, or a public reversal. The list spans outcome-native start-ups (Sierra, Decagon), incumbents adding outcome pricing (Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot), consumption platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Twilio, Datadog), hybrids adding credits to seats (Workday, Genesys, ServiceNow) and cautionary cases (Salesforce, Cursor). Customer service is weighted deliberately, because it is where outcome pricing has taken hold. Microsoft, GitHub, Adobe, Figma and Box have moved to credits but do not yet report the metered part separately, and Atlassian's usage billing starts in December 2026. Model providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI are left out because they sell the model rather than a pricing story on an existing product. Vendors are added as figures appear.
| Vendor | Charges for | Unit buyer counts | Price held | Metered line growing | No backlash | Evidence assessment | Evidence | Source |
|---|
The pattern: stories that charge for a unit the buyer already counts, such as a resolved ticket or a query run, let the buyer forecast the bill against their own volumes. Stories priced in the vendor's internal unit, such as credits, actions or tokens, are harder to budget and have needed more repricing. Newcomers with no seat revenue to protect tell the story most cleanly.
Consumption companies expand faster inside accounts when usage grows, and fall faster when customers optimise. Snowflake shows both halves in one line.
Latest reported quarter. Definitions differ by company; Zoom's covers enterprise customers only. Salesforce and Workday do not disclose a comparable figure.
From SEC filings. The fall through 2023 is customers optimising consumption; it has held near the same level since.
Buyers accept metering for new AI features and resist it for core software. The common complaint is the forecast, not the price.
Futurum enterprise software buyer survey, first half of 2026. Share preferring each model.
Each from a different survey or dataset, named in the row.
| Share | Finding |
|---|
Metering and billing infrastructure is consolidating into payments and CRM platforms, a sign that vendors expect usage pricing to stay.
| Date | Event |
|---|
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