AI Agent 选型逻辑与定价陷阱：Canva流失、HubSpot涨价

Amelia and I both canceled Canva this week. I’d been a customer for about 12 years. We weren’t angry at it, and nobody sat down and decided to replace it. Our agents just never had a use for it.

That happened the same week Canva restructured 22% of the company. Melanie Perkins said in her memo that growth had slowed for the first time in a decade, and back in August Canva had cut its 2026 growth forecast from 30% to 20%.

So this week’s episode of The Agents covered what it means when agents choose the vendors, why “charge for AI” is turning into “screw your base” at a lot of companies, and what we learned when 10K helped close a six-figure deal and two of our agents decided I’m the bottleneck. Our guest was Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt, founder of Willingness to Pay. His Copenhagen shop has run 200+ B2B pricing projects, and his new book, The AI Pricing Roadmap, comes out December 1.

The short version:

• Agents pick vendors once and then stop looking. If you weren’t picked early, a better product later may not get you back in.
• Canva and Figma fell into the same trap: too worried about token costs to ship something competitive, and not confident enough in it to charge real money.
• HubSpot’s new credit model roughly triples the bill for a small marketing team. Raising prices on the base is not a strategy for slowing growth.
• A ~$30M ARR portfolio company launched an agent that doubles ACV. There’s no free version, and 3% of its base adopted in week one. That’s the bar.
• Renewal rates for our $100K+ sponsors went from the 20s to the 70s. 10K says it gets partial credit, and we agree.
• Autonomous agents talking to other agents is very powerful, and it will produce plenty of mistakes before anyone gets the permissions right.

1. Our Agents Never Picked Canva, and They Won’t Go Back

We were both paying $12.95 a month on a legacy Teams plan that Canva doesn’t even sell anymore. What finally got me to log in and cancel was an email saying sales tax would start in the new year. Only then did I notice I hadn’t logged in for about a year.

Canva deserves credit for grandfathering us. A real price increase on an app I wasn’t using would have made me cancel even sooner. But if anyone at Canva had checked my account, my MAUs, WAUs and DAUs went to zero a year ago, when I moved to Higgsfield and Reve. I wrote about this kind of “stealth churn” about a year ago. You don’t see it in the dashboard until the renewal date, or until a small email nudges someone to cancel.

Here’s what I think is the bigger lesson for agents. 10K, our AI VP of Marketing, started in January. Amelia was still using Canva a little that month, but she never connected it to 10K. 10K went straight to Higgsfield over MCP for images and video and to Gamma for decks. Canva has an MCP now, and its new image model may be as good as Higgsfield’s for stills. That doesn’t matter anymore.

Agents have strong opinions while there’s a problem to solve. 10K pushed hard to get us off Marketo, pushed us onto Resend for a lot of email, and argued firmly against us building our own CRM. Once things work and costs are reasonable, they stop bringing it up. Like a human, an agent won’t propose re-evaluating a vendor that’s working. The difference is that a human might eventually get curious. 10K won’t suggest switching back to Canva unless it hits a real blocker.

For vendors: the window to get picked is when an agent is first wired into a workflow. After that, you’re competing against an agent that has no reason to look again.

2. Gamma’s Moat Is Its Rules and Its API

We paid for both Canva and Gamma when 10K started. 10K connected to Gamma because it was easier and the features were better. Every week since, that choice has gotten more firmly embedded.

Gamma can use our real first-party images and data instead of generating fake ones. It’s built rules for this one use case. They may not call them guardrails, but they have 50 to 80 smart people writing them, and that gives you a much better chance of getting a usable deck on the first try. A horizontal LLM won’t write all those rules for presentations. That holds up for a while, maybe not for years.

Amelia doesn’t really use the Gamma app. Everything happens in the API tab, headless. With Gamma 5 the API got noticeably better at editing. She used to have to tell 10K explicitly not to overwrite the prior history when updating a sponsor deck for, say, Intercom/Fin. Now it adds new slides, waits for approval before changing old ones, and can add a “what changed since last time” slide. The product is getting better for agents specifically, and that’s the part that keeps you picked.

3. Best of Breed Still Wins Right Now, and That’s Bad for Suites

Through 2022 and 2023 suites won. HubSpot went from marketing automation to CRM to everything, and if it was cost-effective, one vendor was simply easier.

AI isn’t there yet. Image generation, video, outbound and marketing automation all have a clearly better tool today, and agents can tell which one it is, or at least believe they can. That leaves a window where a category leader can beat a broad platform. Canva was the suite and lost to the specialists, Gamma on slides and Higgsfield on images.

Adobe looks like the counterexample. Amelia kept Creative Cloud, at roughly $59 a month for a single seat, because the AI upscaling is very good. She only needs it about two months a year, around SaaStr AI Annual, when images from Gamma, Replit or Higgsfield need upscaling. Her usage is down but she hasn’t stealth churned. The AI features are good enough to justify keeping a suite, and I think that’s why Adobe isn’t seeing Canva-level churn.

4. Canva Got Stuck Between Token Costs and Gross Margin

Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder, came on 20VC a while ago, and he got a little prickly when I mentioned Gamma. I didn’t even know Canva did slides. They knew exactly what was happening. No one at these companies is stupid.

His problem was simple. Gamma could spend close to 100% of its revenue on tokens. Canva, approaching $4B, was expected to hold 75-80%+ gross margins. Matching Gamma or Higgsfield would have pushed those margins toward 50-60%. We watched Figma give up roughly 5 points of gross margin to AI, and the market punished it.

Imagine being at $3B and facing a $500M-a-year OpenAI bill. A large company can’t decide that in an afternoon. Waiting was logical. It was also a mistake. Canva will regret not taking the margin hit 8 to 12 months ago, because the models got so much better this year that the gap is now about product competitiveness, and paying for more inference won’t close it.

No one at OpenAI set out to kill Canva. A year ago we all thought LLMs would wipe out the application layer and build everything themselves. Mostly that hasn’t happened. Claude Design didn’t kill Figma. But if your core use case sits close to what an LLM does natively, you can get hurt by accident. Canva was right in that path.

5. HubSpot Roughly Tripled the Bill for a Small Marketing Team

Amelia priced HubSpot’s new model for a small three-person B2B marketing team: 10,000 contacts, a weekly newsletter of about 40,000 emails a month, and about 20,000 workflow actions a month. That’s a startup just out of YC.

Old pricing: about $1,300 a month, mostly seats (about $800). Actions were unlimited.

New pricing (rolled out in October): seats drop to about $300, but everything else is now credits. The 10,000 included credits don’t go far. Total: about $3,700 a month.

Ulrik is a HubSpot customer and got hit with the same numbers. His head of marketing called HubSpot and said the newsletter was leaving. They got a discount. The model charges the same credit for a targeted outbound sequence as for a newsletter send. That suggests it was never tested against the range of things customers actually do.