B2B 三大新定价模型：按量、按结果、按席位已死

Henry Schuck, CEO of ZoomInfo, posted his read on where B2B pricing is going. His summary, after talking to the world’s most expensive consultants and hundreds of his own customers: nobody knows. Not the experts, not the customers, and the answer keeps changing week to week.

But sitting still is not a strategy, it’s a slow death spiral today.

A few things I’d add. First, the pressure on the old model is only growing and it isn’t only about AI. Second, three new models have actually emerged. They are not equally viable, they are not equally hard to run, and which one fits you comes down to whether you can name a single countable thing your software does that a customer would pay for on its own.

The seat model is dying for three reasons, and only one of them is AI per se

#1. Four years of price increases used up all the headroom

Seat pricing has been carrying the entire revenue burden of B2B for four years, and vendors leaned on it hard.

The Vertice SaaS Inflation Index, built off tens of billions in processed spend, has run between 12% and 16.4% through 2026, against roughly 2.7% general inflation in the G7. It peaked at 14.7% in Q4 2025, timed to renewal season, and sat at 16.4% in June 2026. SaaS cost per employee went from about $7,900 in 2023 to $8,700 in 2024 to roughly $9,100 by the end of 2025.

Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, drawn from 40M+ licenses and $75B+ in tracked spend, shows what that feels like on the buyer side. The average enterprise now spends $55.7M a year on SaaS, up another 8%, while the portfolio sits flat at 305 applications. App count actually fell 0.07%. So none of the spend growth came from buying more software. All of it came from price, packaging, and tier expansion inside contracts that already existed.

79% of IT leaders hit a price increase at renewal in the past 12 months, 78% got unexpected charges tied to AI features or consumption, and 61% cut planned projects to absorb unplanned SaaS cost increases.

Those cuts are the point. When a customer has already absorbed 12% a year for four years, the fifth ask lands very differently. CIOs are uniformly now asking for cuts at renewals. Which leads to reason #2 …

#2. CIOs are cutting traditional B2B software to fund tokens

This is the part that’s newer, and it’s the biggest one.

Redpoint’s March 2026 survey of 141 CIOs (we covered the full report here) is the clearest data on it:

• 45% say their AI budgets are coming out of existing software budgets, not net-new money
• 54% are actively running vendor consolidation programs
• Only 3% expect AI to lead to more vendors
• 58% say AI feature additions are the number one driver of software spend increases, the highest of any category

Goldman Sachs’ CIO work points the same direction, with roughly two-thirds of AI inference cost being funded through reallocation rather than new budget, and 42% of CIOs now expecting AI to exceed 10% of their budget within three years. Creative Strategies’ index puts only about 28 cents of each incremental AI dollar as net-new IT budget. The remaining 72 cents comes from something that was already in the stack.

Not every survey agrees. RBC’s CIO work has most respondents describing AI money as new budget. But the range across sources runs from “mostly reallocated” to “partly reallocated,” and nobody credible is arguing it’s all incremental.

Practically: your renewal is now competing with a token bill. Publicis Sapient has publicly said it is cutting traditional SaaS licenses by roughly half, Adobe included, and substituting AI tools. When a Fortune 500 buyer puts that in writing, every procurement team in the Global 2000 starts building the same deck.

If you sell per seat, you are the funding source. That is the position you’re negotiating from in 2026.

#3. The unit itself came unglued from the value

Seat pricing prices headcount. It was a good proxy for twenty years because headcount was a good proxy for how much work was getting done.

That link is breaking. When a customer’s support team handles 3x the volume with the same 40 people, seat pricing bills you the same for tripling the output. When the team goes from 40 to 25 because agents are doing the L1 work, seat pricing bills you less for delivering more. You built the thing that shrank your own invoice.

This is the mechanism behind something we wrote up earlier this month: total software spend is growing faster than ever, but the categories priced per seat (CRM, sales, marketing, CX, collaboration) are growing in single digits while the market grows 15%+. The market didn’t stop. The billing unit did.

CIOs have already priced this in. In the same Redpoint survey, 46% expect usage or outcome-based pricing to become more common and 29% expect seat-based pricing to decline outright.

Seats aren’t going to zero. Almost every model below still has a platform fee attached to some notion of who has access. But “just seats” as the whole model is done, and the three reasons above are compounding at the same renewal table.

Model 1: Consumption

You pay for what you use. Credits, tokens, lookups, records, runs.

Henry’s objection is an important one. Consumption pricing can lead to massive cost overruns. We’ve all see it in tokenmaxxing, especially. Customers moved to consumption, saw their AI bills, and freaked out. Forecasting spend is hard when the underlying usage is variable and finance has to commit to a number twelve months out.

Where I’d push back a little: agents can solve a large chunk of this today. Help your customers here. You don’t have to force them into cost overruns.

“Spend up to $1,000 on ZoomInfo this month, prioritize the highest-value use cases.” Will an agent nail that perfectly? No. Will it allocate that budget better than 95% of the humans who currently do it by hand and by gut? Yes. Will it stop at $1,000? Usually, and usually is already better than the status quo, where nobody is watching the meter at all.

Most vendors shipped consumption pricing without shipping the controls to manage it. That is what makes it feel like a trap. If you bill by usage, you owe your customer four things:

• A hard cap they set, not you. Not an alert. A stop.
• Pre-bought blocks with rollover. Henry’s team is testing exactly this, offering a pre-bought consumption model to a segment of customers this quarter. Committed spend gives finance a number to plan against and gives you the deferred revenue.
• Threshold alerting that goes to the buyer, not just the admin. The person who signs the renewal should find out at 60% of budget, not on the invoice.
• A budget API an agent can read. Almost nobody has built this. If agents are doing the spending, they need to query remaining budget the same way they query anything else.

Ship those four and most of the bill-shock objection goes away.

Model 2: Outcome

You pay when a defined business result happens. Not usage, not access. Results.

This is hard in roughly 95% of categories, and Henry names why for GTM: there are too many steps between the software and a closed deal to attribute the deal to the software. Anyone who has sat through an attribution argument knows how that one ends.

It also carries its own bill-shock risk, in reverse. If the thing works spectacularly, the customer owes a lot of money. Vendors love that. Procurement does not, and neither does the CFO who budgeted a flat number.

The enterprise still loves it when it’s done right, because it converts a software purchase into a business case. “We will save you $20B, and we will demonstrate it. In turn you pay us $2B.” A CFO can approve that conversation.