The pricing model that built the SaaS industry is being replaced in real time. Is your finance team ready for what it does to your core metrics?

In episode #374, Ben Murray breaks down the four SaaS P&L metrics that break when per-seat pricing dies. Public tech leaders are already shifting fast. ServiceNow now drives 50% of net new business from non-seat-based pricing, Workday is reporting hundreds of millions in AI ARR, and GitHub is moving Copilot to usage-based billing. If you are a SaaS CFO or finance leader still modeling on a single blended gross margin, your benchmarks are about to stop working.

Why the AI product gross margin sits around 52% and how a 30% revenue mix shift can compress your blended margin by 10 to 15 points
How AI COGS scale directly with product usage, breaking the near-zero incremental cost assumption traditional SaaS finance was built on
Why one blended LTV no longer works once you have heavy, medium, and light AI usage cohorts, and how to rebuild LTV to CAC by cohort
How CAC payback period shifts when gross margin is no longer a single number across the customer base
The new frameworks finance teams need to model hybrid subscription plus usage and outcome-based pricing before the board notices the margin compression

Tune in to get ahead of the pricing shift before your next forecast and board deck go out.

Resources Mentioned

Ben's blog post on the SaaS pricing revolution: https://www.thesaascfo.com/saas-per-seat-pricing/
Ben's AI course for SaaS finance leaders: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ai-finance-metrics-saas

4 SaaS P&L Metrics That Break When You Kill Per-Seat Pricing

SaaS Metrics School

4 SaaS P&L Metrics That Break When You Kill Per-Seat Pricing