Usage Based Pricing (UBP) - What SaaS Customers Want in 2026
For years, the seat-based model for SaaS has thrived, see the example of Asana:
A user at their started plan will pay $10.99 per user, per month.
That would mean…
A small team of 5 would pay: $54.95 / month
A medium company of 20 would pay: $219.80 / month
A big company of 1000 would pay: $10,990 / month
Costs rises with the company, becoming a non-insignificant cost to have your whole team or a multi-team company on it.
While, many of your employees might barely use the tool.
You still pay just to add the summer intern, a collaborator, or a secretary that only views the manager’s tasks…
Add to that companies raising their prices over 2025.
Price Conscious Businesses
Businesses become price conscious in 2026.
Market uncertainty, volatility, and cut budgets over the past 2 years are making buyers question vendor pricing.
Anyone who is not locked into long-term contracts or business processes rethinks their budgeting:
Removing vendors
Vibe-coding their mini-solutions
Moving to cheaper alternatives
Buyers want to pay a fairer price (that is not always cheaper).
The Rise of AI Credits
The move to usage based pricing is increasing speed due to AI.
Sounds weird that AI is everywhere these days…
Major AI companies offer either their APIs or Software usage in a UBP (usage based pricing).
An example is Lovable, where you pay $50 for 200 credits.
What you do with those 200 credits is on. I build a plugin to save my LinkedIn posts with 150-200 credits worth of Lovable … it essentially cost me $50 to build it:
And, using OpenAI to create a chatbot, write SEO posts, or call your N8N workflows is using credits.
It may cost a few cents of the dollar to write an article.
It may cost a few more cents to automate your email workflow.
All those are credit-based systems where you either pre-pay for credits or pay-as-you-go.
Traditional Usage Based Pricing
You know, usage based pricing has been common for a long time before SaaS took over and made subscriptions so popular (again).
Telecommunications - Charging for how much you called
Utilities - Charging for electricity / water consumption
Taxis - Charging for how many kilometers / miles they drove you
Is that a Trend?
Buyers are trying to control budgets, and cannot do that if big software vendors lock them in $50k contracts for a year they barely use.
Trying to identify how much “real” usage they get out of product and what they can shave off the pricing is the real trick here.
However, usage-based pricing if the client is trying to be budget conscious, does not work for businesses either.
Reality Check-In
Incumbents will be using usage-based-pricing to position themselves as alternatives to legacy SaaS.
But, UBP is only going to last so long.
When incumbents move to enterprise, they will be trying a different approach, which is usually seat-based to get the big fish in a more profitable way.
That reality check on UBP being temporary is sharp. Most SaaS companies market it as cusotmer friendly but the end game is still locking in enterprises with seat-based deals once they prove product-market fit. The AI credit model comparison makes sense tbh, we're basically seeing utility pricing repackaged for software with beter optics.