Howdy pricing people! Huge thanks to everyone who joined our latest Office Hours, and a big thank you to @Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt of Willingness to Pay for answering 30+ of your questions on one of the messiest topics in pricing right now: what to charge for when the thing using your product might be a machine. The whole session basically resolved to one distinction — are you pricing the door, or the work that goes through it? Breaking down my 5 top takeaways below for those who couldn't make it: 1️⃣ Don't price the door. Price what gets carried through it. Your API, your own interface, and an MCP endpoint are all just doors into your product. The mistake Ulrik sees teams about to make is pricing the door — charging for the privilege of connecting, as if the connector were the product. It isn't. The value is whatever the customer carries out through it, and that's the thing you meter. The practical upshot: don't build a separate price list per channel, or you'll re-run this entire exercise the day you ship the next door. Pick one underlying value metric and let every channel — interface, API, MCP — debit the same thing. As Ulrik put it, meter the water, not the tap. 2️⃣ Decide whether you're selling an input or an outcome. This is the fork everything else hangs on. An input is a token, a call, raw access — you price it like a utility, thin and on volume, like electricity. An outcome is a job the customer actually wanted done — and you price that on its value. The cleanest example he gave: Intercom charging for a resolved support ticket rather than a message, at a fraction of what a human resolution costs. The customer knows exactly what they got and exactly what it was worth. Tokens are where you start, not where you finish — and if you contract your price to the compute bill, every future cost saving belongs to your customer instead of you. 3️⃣ Wrap it in a unit the buyer can actually budget. Nobody budgets tokens. Raw MCP calls are a dense, technical metric your buyer can't forecast and your salesperson can't explain, which turns every renewal into a physics lecture. Put credits (or whole workflows) between your raw usage and the invoice, keep the dollar-to-credit ratio simple enough to do in your head, and carry the per-call complexity in the terms where it belongs. And if you already run credits for in-platform AI — don't build a second economy for MCP. One wallet, one unit, debited wherever the work happens. If an agent costs more to serve for the same job, put that in the credit weight of the action, not a separate subscription the customer has to reason about.

Howdy pricing people! Next week, I'm teaming up with Pat Doran, Managing Director of Pricing at SBI, for a Live Growth Forum on the State of SaaS Pricing in 2026. Here's why I'm fired up about this one: Pat's team just surveyed 350+ operators and execs who actually own pricing strategy. I'm bringing the real-time, company-level data from PricingSaaS across 3,000+ companies. So you get the survey side and the behavioral side stitched together — the clearest read on what's actually working in monetization right now. A few things we're going to dig into: - Why companies that bury AI infrastructure costs into flat pricing miss revenue targets at twice the rate of those who don't. - Why dedicated pricing ownership is beating the old pricing-committee model. - Why seats still matter to most pricing models — and keep outperforming the flashier usage and outcome-based alternatives. We'll also get into what good agentic and MCP pricing looks like as the seat-to-value paradigm shifts, grounded in real case studies of who's executing well and what they're doing differently. Details below: Tuesday, June 17th @ 12pm EDT Register here 👉 https://events.sbigrowth.com/thestateofsaaspricing-2026 Hope to see you there! Rob

For all the pricing leaders out there, Procore is hiring a Senior Director of Pricing and Monetization, who will report to the VP of Corporate Strategy. If you’re interested, check out the link or shoot me a DM and I'll put you in touch!

Howdy pricing people! We've got a great one coming up this Thursday. @Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt , CEO of Willingness To Pay, is joining us to answer your questions on pricing and packaging AI usage. Ulrik works with B2B software teams on exactly the problem everyone's wrestling with right now: how to monetize AI features when usage is unpredictable and costs can run away from you. If you've been staring at your AI margins wondering how to package this stuff, his perspective is hard to get anywhere else. A few things we're going to dig into: - How to price and package MCP access - Whether unlimited plans are a growth lever or a margin trap - How to actually write a fair use policy that holds up Details below: Thursday, June 18th @ 12:30pm EST Register here 👉 https://luma.com/y70r7esb Hope to see you there! Rob

For the past month, a handful of users have been beta testing PricingSaaS Pulse. The feedback has completely reshaped how I think about the Pulse product. When @John Kotowski and I started PricingSaaS, the goal was to make pricing expertise accessible to the average product team. We'd both witnessed our own versions of pricing paralysis. As a consultant, I watched clients struggle to drive consensus. As a Chief Product Officer, John lived the pain firsthand. Often, when teams are staring down a new launch, they freeze. Not because the team isn't smart. Because there are just so many options, and its hard to cut through the noise and figure out what makes the most sense. Pulse is solving that. The clearest pattern from beta: Pulse works as a pricing intelligence layer that plugs in alongside a team's own internal context. The combination of internal context, and our structured market data is the unlock. On one side: Their documentation, their data, their customer transcripts. On the other: A clean, objective view of what companies are actually doing. The most interesting thing we're seeing: a handful of beta users have started using Pulse to build their own pricing agents. The recommendations those agents are producing are sharp. Specific. Grounded in what's actually shipping. It's the closest thing to a real pricing copilot I've seen. We soft launched last week. If you're a SaaS operator or pricing consultant and you want to take it for a spin, comment here or shoot me a DM and I'll get you squared away.