Happy Halloween! Who’s your favorite horror movie villain?
At this point, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, and Michael Myers are all the devils we know. We’re deeply familiar with their quirks, their preferences, and their grim origin stories.
Want to know what’s really scary? The unknown. The thing that’s lurking in the basement, the attic, the alleyway, or in your unconscious (remember – the call is always coming from inside the house).
Halloween is the one night we willingly step into that unknown. We dim the lights, open the door, and invite something unpredictable inside.
That’s exactly what’s happening with AI right now. It’s the spooky season out there. Especially for established SaaS companies that are suddenly contending with a dozen new “AI native” competitors.
Everywhere I go, I hear the same mix of excitement (“Our devs are on fire!”) and anxiety (“My SFDC bill just went up 6x!”). Everyone knows AI will change the game. But no one knows how it will change their game. And just like a good horror story, what scares us most isn’t the monster itself—it’s what we can’t yet see.
AI is a fundamental rewrite of how value is created, consumed, and measured. And that’s forcing SaaS leaders to confront three big unknowns: variable pricing, variable usage, and variable ROI.
Let’s shine a flashlight on each.
The Phantom of Variable Pricing
For two decades, SaaS pricing was simple and safe. Sell seats. Throw in extra for usage. Renew annually.
AI doesn’t care about any of that. An AI co-pilot might run thousands of queries for one user and zero for another. A model might deliver huge business impact for one customer, and modest gains for the next.
So how do you price that? By token? By API call? By value created? None of the old frameworks quite fit.
A 2024 Bain & Company survey found that over 60% of SaaS leaders expect to completely overhaul their pricing models in the next two years—driven mainly by AI. That’s not a tweak. That’s a tectonic shift.
Static pricing is the real ghost here—it haunts your margins and chases away your best customers. The brave ones are already experimenting: credits, tiers, value metrics, hybrid models.
Pricing is no longer a spreadsheet. It’s ALIVE!
The Curse of Variable Usage
AI has broken the old rhythm of software consumption. In the past, usage was a steady pulse—you could almost set your watch by it. Logins, sessions, storage, seats. Predictable.
Now? It’s chaos. One customer runs 10,000 AI queries on Monday and zero the rest of the month. Another suddenly triples their usage overnight when a new workflow takes off. That’s wild volatility in a business that used to be built on predictability.
Traditional forecasting models can’t handle that kind of variability. Neither can most finance teams. But here’s the thing—your customers aren’t being erratic. They’re exploring. Learning. Adapting.
The challenge is to stop treating customers like subscribers on rails and start seeing them as participants in a dynamic value loop. Their usage might swing, but their relationship can still deepen—if you’re measuring the right things.
The Monster of Variable ROI
Here’s the scariest unknown of all: return on investment.
Every CFO wants to see the math. Every CEO wants to justify the spend. But with AI, the math gets fuzzy. The value doesn’t show up neatly in one place—it ripples across functions.
Support costs drop. Engineers move faster. Customers stay longer. But how do you capture that on a dashboard?
A recent McKinsey study found that only 15% of companies using generative AI can currently quantify a measurable ROI. Not because it’s not there—but because their metrics weren’t designed to find it.
This is the moment to redefine “return.” It’s not a single number anymore. It’s a system that evolves as your product and your customers evolve. The winners will link usage, pricing, and outcomes in real time. The rest will keep guessing in the dark.
Embrace the Darkness!
This is the next chapter of the Subscription Economy. We started with ownership to access. Then services to experiences. Now we’re moving from predictability to…probability.
The best companies won’t try to control every variable. They’ll learn to read them. To sense and adapt faster than their competitors. They’ll treat variability not as chaos, but as a signal.
If Halloween teaches us anything, it’s that fear fades when you turn on the lights. Once you see the pattern, the monster becomes just another part of the story.
Next week, I’ll talk about how to do that. The secret? Focusing on your company’s Unit of Measurement—the fundamental way your customers express value. It’s a metric that changes with time, but if you can clearly quantify your core service, then variable pricing, usage, and ROI all start to make sense.
Until then, don’t be afraid of the dark! That’s where the future lives.
