Pricing built before the market changed
Seat-based pricing is no longer the default it was, and among the companies buyers look at in this range it often was not the default to begin with. What matters in diligence is not which model a target uses but whether anyone has examined it since it was set, and what moving it would cost.
Per-seat pricing answered a question that has changed. It assumed the number of people using the software was a fair proxy for the value they got from it. Where software now does the work rather than helping a person do it, that proxy weakens, and the vendor is charging for headcount in a product whose argument is needing less of it.
That is a real problem for some companies and irrelevant to others, which is the first thing to establish rather than assume.
What the current data actually says
The clearest recent read is Kyle Poyar’s 2026 State of B2B Monetization, a survey of 230 software and AI companies run in April and May 2026. Hybrid pricing, a base fee with a metered component on top, is now the most common primary structure at 37%, up from 25% a year earlier. Seat-based pricing is most common among the largest companies in the sample, at 29% of those above 150 million dollars of ARR. Companies below 5 million dollars of ARR most often use flat fees, at 37%.
So the picture at the size a buyer is usually looking at is not a market of seat-based companies waiting to be converted. It is a mix, and the mix skews away from seats at both ends of the range.
The investor view is less mixed. Asked which model they prefer, the same survey found 35% for hybrid, 26% for outcome-based and 24% for usage-based, against 10% for flat-fee subscriptions and 5% for seat-based. Gartner’s forecast runs the same way over a longer horizon: at least 40% of enterprise SaaS spend shifting toward usage, agent or outcome-based pricing by 2030, with seat-based vendor revenue share falling from 21% to 15%.
A target priced on seats is not therefore mispriced. It may be a company whose customers genuinely add users as they get more value, which is what per-seat pricing is for. The question worth asking is narrower: when was this price last examined, against what, and by whom.
The part that does not make it into the deck
Moving toward outcomes moves risk from the customer to the vendor, and after close the vendor is you.
Under a subscription you are paid whether or not the customer succeeds. Under an outcome model you are paid when a result occurs, so revenue depends on the customer’s data quality, their process, their adoption and their willingness to agree the result happened. Disputes about attribution become disputes about invoices.
It also unsettles the forecast. Recurring revenue is valuable to an acquirer partly because it is predictable, and consumption revenue is structurally less so. A company mid-transition can show a growth story and a forecasting problem at once.
And it interacts with cost. The 2026 Aleph and Benchmarkit benchmarks put median software gross margin at 80% but usage-only pricing at 62%, because in a consumption model compute cost scales with the revenue rather than against a fixed subscription.
What good looks like after close
Where a change is warranted, hybrid is usually where it lands: a platform fee that protects the forecast, plus a metered layer that captures value where it varies. Migrate the base in cohorts rather than all at once, because repricing everyone in the same quarter is the fastest way to turn a pricing gain into churn. Model the margin at the new pricing before announcing it rather than after.
Where a change is not warranted, saying so is the more useful answer, and it is the one a buyer rarely gets from anyone paid to run a project.
More insights
The tender was written for someone
In B2B software the best product does not always win the deal. Most buyers have a favorite before they speak to any vendor, requirement documents tend to describe the product the authors already know, and in many markets relationships and local presence count as much as features. For a buyer of a SaaS company, that changes how a pipeline and a win rate should be read.
Sold through someone else
A B2B2B software company sells to a partner, and the partner then has to sell to its own business customers. That puts 2 sales cycles, an onboarding project and a revenue share between the product and the revenue. The model can reach further than a direct team ever could, but a plan that counts signed partners as if they were selling will overstate it.
Last updated