Hey pricing people! We have a great Office Hours session in store next week. I'll be joined by @Fynn Glover, CEO of Schematic to discuss how companies can build a modern pricing architecture. Fynn is my go-to person to send people when they're running into pricing tech bottlenecks. And every person I have sent his way has thanked me profusely afterwards. In this Office Hours, Fynn and I will dig into: - Why your billing tool isn't the bottleneck (and what actually is) - The five pillars of a modern pricing architecture: unified product catalog, decoupled entitlements, real-time metering, company profiles, and a GTM control plane - How companies like Plotly ship and monetize AI products two quarters faster than their peers - What it takes for non-engineers to iterate on monetization without filing a ticket - Why, in the AI era, pricing agility is revenue agility If you've ever had a "creative pricing conversation" die because someone said "our systems can't do that" — this one's for you. Bring your questions. We'll workshop them live. Details below: Date: Thursday, June 4th Time: 12pm EST Registration Link: https://luma.com/7okgi8rk Hope to see you there! Rob

Big thanks to everyone who joined Office Hours last week. This was one of our most popular sessions ever, and for good reason. @Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt brought the heat with an absolute clinic on how to price, protect margins, and not lose your shirt as AI eats into cost structures. Breaking down my 5 top takeaways below for those who couldn't make it: 1️⃣ The "double hockey stick" is the real AI pricing trap We're all used to the idea that value is unevenly distributed across customers — some get massive value, most get medium, a few get none. What Ulrik nailed in this session is that AI introduces a SECOND hockey stick: cost distribution. He shared a real example from a client with a couple hundred million in ARR where 75% of their entire GenAI cost was driven by just 0.1% of users. Thousands of users driving three-quarters of all consumption. The critical insight: there's no natural law that says your value hockey stick is proportional to your cost hockey stick. You can build a beautiful AI product that turns dollars into dimes. Or you can be like @Steven Meyer at Placer.ai, serving customers ~$50K/week of value at $150 in cost. Most of us land somewhere in the middle, but you have to KNOW where, and you only learn by putting product in the market and measuring. 2️⃣ Define fair use in dollars, not actions This was the most tactical part of the session. Most companies set fair use policies as "more than 500 API calls per month" or some action count. Ulrik's argument: that metric will be obsolete the second your model changes or your prompt structures shift. Track REAL COST per user in real time, and trigger fair use at dollar thresholds. The framework: bucket your users (malicious vs non-malicious, new vs tenured, monthly vs annual, by vertical, whatever matters). Build your fair use policy along a dollar cost line. Then run different policies per bucket and tune to the margin you want. He has customers where they literally use fair use policies to "decide the margin of the product" — turn the dial, get the gross margin you want.

Happy Monday pricing people! We've got an awesome Office Hours topic this week. On Thursday, I'll be hosting a session with @Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt about managing AI costs. As most of you know, this is one of the gnarliest problems in SaaS right now. So we're talking about it. Here's what we're planning to cover: ▶ Designing fair use policies that protect margin without alienating customers ▶ When (and how) to use throttling, queuing, and rate limits ▶ Structuring cost-to-serve into your pricing model from day one ▶ What the high-consumption companies are learning the hard way We're collecting questions in advance, and will leave room for Q&A at the end. It's Thursday at 10am EST (we will record it). Grab your seat here: https://luma.com/8q7djgto

Hey everybody — hope you had a great weekend. We want to give community members first crack at our new research platform, PricingSaaS Pulse, and we're testing a new event format to do it: Live Research Lab. Here's the idea — you bring the pricing question, we'll do the digging in Pulse beforehand, and then we'll walk through what we found together in an hour-long session. We're keeping these intentionally small so everyone walks away with solid takeaways and we can actually go deep on what we're seeing. The first one is this Thursday at 1pm EST. Would love to have you there — and I'd love your thoughts on the format. Register here: [link] Rob

Hey pricing people! Next week, we're trying something new. We're hosting an Office Hours session with 3 of our own community members! All 3 have deep experience in monetizing AI at leading Enterprise companies. The panelists include: ▶ Mihir Wagle: Product Leader at Microsoft Fabric ▶ Kareem El Muslemany: Pricing Leader at Zoom ▶ Akshay Patel: Product Executive at AWS We'll start with questions submitted from attendees, then open the floor to Q&A and have an open conversation on the biggest topics in SaaS and AI monetization. Personally, I can't wait to learn from them (and all of you) 🫡 Grab your seat here: https://luma.com/slaqk955