r/startups

8h ago

u/Fnepf

Pricing discussion - Is per seat dead and usage/outcome based the future?(headless). i will not promote.

I will not promote

We’re two founders in Stockholm building a CRM. A few weeks ago we changed our pricing and stopped charging per seat. I’m still not sure if that was smart or naive, so I’d like to hear from people who’ve priced it either way.

What pushed us was one customer. He’s a co-founder at a small consultancy and he almost never opens our app. He updates everything through his AI assistant over MCP: it drafts the updates and he approves them. About 92% of the updates in his account are written by the AI.

When we first pitched him our pricing (which was per seat), he was disappointed. He said seat-based pricing is old news and that in the AI era you should charge for outcomes.

He got me thinking about what a seat actually is. It’s a price on how many humans you have.…