You’re the CFO of Outreach.
You're a leading revenue-tech SaaS company.
You're evolving from a core SaaS product into a multi-product SaaS + AI offering.
How would you:
Price and package both SaaS and AI?
Deliver usage transparency and clarity to customers?
Support the systems complexity of hybrid billing, hybrid GTM, and multiple product lines?
Factor in new COGS realities for AI?
Operationalize, report on, and forecast new pricing models like credit burn-down?
I had a conversation on Monetizing AI with Drew Laxton, who is living and breathing these questions every day.
If you’re a founder, product leader, finance leader, or sales leader building a multi-product company, trying to navigate credit-based pricing and support hybrid selling & billing, this episode is worth your time.
Here are four insights that stood out:
1. Credit-based AI pricing must be simple and margin-aware.
The market is coalescing around credit burndown as a pricing model. Pure SaaS pricing can sink your margins fast. Credits protect our margins and deliver flexibility and transparency to our customers.
2. Multi-product pricing changes your whole operating model.
Switching to consumption pricing touches everything — product, billing, Salesforce, analytics. Every system has to know how many credits a customer has and how they’re using them.
3. You need thoughtful systems architecture to succeed.
Pricing and packaging is governed by three stacks: product, finance, and sales. They must be well integrated to deliver the flexibility customers have come to demand.
4. Consumption and credit-based pricing changes your math — and your story.
If a $60K credit package burns twice as fast, is that $120K ARR? If it burns half as fast, is it $30K? Straight-lining contracts doesn’t work. You have to do math you never had to do before — and be transparent with your stakeholders about the volatility.
I learned a lot from this conversation.
Full episode linked in comments