
AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models - kfarzaneh
http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/18/ai-is-going-to-kill-seat-based-saas-models/
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valuearb
No. Just because per seat pricing might create the incentive to limit offering
productivity enhancements, doesn't mean that incentive won't be dwarfed by
competitive pressures.

And it doesn't matter what you want, customers want to pay in ways that are
easy, predictable and make sense to them. Devs can do the math to predict
compute costs with Amazon. But hitting a typical SaaS customer with a surprise
large AI Calc bill will be a huge problem.

Per seat pricing tracks to value for most customers, is predictable and will
likely continue to be the preference for a very long while.

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MaulingMonkey
Agreed on all points.

There are already plenty of per-seat licensing models that explicitly
acknowledge bots - e.g. Perforce's "service users" (used for e.g. the heavy
hitting CI build accounts that have more activity than dozens of engineers
combined) which don't even count against seat limits. Per seat is just a way
to charge roughly by organization size, which has some semi-linear correlation
to SaaS usage, even if automation / "AI" adds a potentially large productivity
or load multiplier.

Even if "AI" somehow breaks that assumption at some point, where one engineer
can reasonably use 'infinite' resources, it's pretty easy to couch usage based
pricing in the veneer of seat based pricing. Just apply rate limits per user -
say, high enough to handle your 95th percentile customers - and offer "virtual
seats" for the power users who want to increase their API rates, or require a
higher tier "enterprise" accounts - just as existing SaaSes already do,
complete with public documentation of some of their API limits right on the
pricing page no less.

