Usage based billing disincentivizes customers from using your product. Seat based billing disincentivizes customers from giving people access to your product. Feature based prizing makes it harder to try features locked in more expensive plans, and disincentivizes smaller use cases.
Which of those is the smallest negative depends on your product.
In our opinion, the future of billing is hybrid. This means customers pay a platform fee (a subscription) but don't face blocks for exceeding their plan's limits. Offering multiple plans with appropriate entitlements related to the feature set is still possible. However, blocking usage instead of billing for overage represents a lost revenue opportunity. Most customers won't upgrade, so we recommend allowing them to pay for overconsumption on top of the base fee.
