{"id":23541,"date":"2026-08-25T14:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/the-3-new-pricing-models-in-b2b-pick-one-because-the-old-one-just-seats-really-is-dying\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T14:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:10:11","slug":"the-3-new-pricing-models-in-b2b-pick-one-because-the-old-one-just-seats-really-is-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/the-3-new-pricing-models-in-b2b-pick-one-because-the-old-one-just-seats-really-is-dying\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3 New Pricing Models in B2B. Pick One, Because The Old One (Just Seats) Really is Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Henry Schuck<\/a>, CEO of ZoomInfo, just posted his read on where B2B pricing is going. His summary, after talking to the world\u2019s most expensive consultants and hundreds of his own customers: nobody knows.<\/strong><\/span> Not the experts, not the customers, and the answer keeps changing week to week.<\/p>\n

But sitting still is not a strategy, it\u2019s a slow death spiral today.<\/p>\n

A few things I\u2019d add. First, the pressure on the old model is only growing and it isn\u2019t only about AI. Second, three new models have actually emerged. They are not equally viable, they are not equally hard to run, and which one fits you comes down to whether you can name a single countable thing your software does that a customer would pay for on its own. And third, more and more, the agents will pick the vendor.\u00a0 And the model is critical to that decision.<\/p>\n

The seat model is dying for three reasons, and only one of them is AI per se<\/h2>\n

#1. Four years of price increases used up all the headroom<\/h3>\n

Seat pricing has been carrying the entire revenue burden of B2B for four years, and vendors leaned on it hard.<\/p>\n

The Vertice SaaS Inflation Index, built off tens of billions in processed spend, has run between 12% and 16.4% through 2026, against roughly 2.7% general inflation in the G7. It peaked at 14.7% in Q4 2025, timed to renewal season, and sat at 16.4% in June 2026. B2B software cost per employee went from about $7,900 in 2023 to $8,700 in 2024 to roughly $9,100 by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n

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Zylo\u2019s 2026 SaaS Management Index, drawn from 40M+ licenses and $75B+ in tracked spend, shows what that feels like on the buyer side. The average enterprise now spends $55.7M a year on SaaS, up<\/span> another<\/em> 8%, while the portfolio sits flat at 305 applications. App count actually fell 0.07%<\/strong>. So none of the spend growth came from buying more software. All of it came from price, packaging, and tier expansion inside contracts that already existed.<\/p>\n

79% of IT leaders hit a price increase at renewal in the past 12 months, 78% got unexpected charges tied to AI features or consumption, and 61% cut planned projects to absorb unplanned SaaS cost increases.<\/p>\n

Those cuts are the point. When a customer has already absorbed 12% a year for four years, the fifth ask lands very differently. CIOs are uniformly now asking for cuts<\/em> at renewals.<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Which leads to reason #2 \u2026<\/p>\n

#2. CIOs are cutting traditional B2B software to fund tokens<\/h3>\n

This is the part that\u2019s newer, and it\u2019s the biggest one. The money for all those tokens has to come from somewhere.<\/p>\n

Redpoint\u2019s March 2026 survey of 141 CIOs (we covered the full report here<\/a>) is the clearest data on it:<\/p>\n