Great session today with @Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt and @Emil Eriksson on taming AI margins. You can find the full recording and transcript in Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hBZnQ6HWlzPwNgB9rw8ZrnXA9Uk0Ba5t?usp=drive_link If you're working on this and could use a sounding board, shoot me a DM! Otherwise, hope to see you at the next one. Rob

PricingSaaS has officially joined Willingness to Pay 🎉 I wanted to share this here because this community has become such an important part of what we’re building. The short version of the story: Back in 2024, I cold-DMed Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt after reading The Pricing Roadmap. I was hoping he might sponsor PricingSaaS for a few months. Instead, he made a much bigger bet on us: sponsoring us for two years in exchange for a piece of the company. That relationship turned into monthly board meetings, a ton of trust, and eventually a conversation this summer about what would happen if we joined forces. For John and me, it was an easy decision. We now have an opportunity to build something much bigger: a single platform where SaaS and AI leaders can learn about monetization, understand what’s happening across the market, and get hands-on help putting it into practice. And this community is going to be a big part of that. We’re going to keep investing in it, bringing in great operators, consultants, and builders, and doing more live events and conversations around pricing, packaging, and AI monetization. There’s an insane amount changing in software right now, and our goal is to make this the best place to figure it out together. Thanks to everyone here who has been part of PricingSaaS so far. We're just getting started. 🚀 Rob PS. Today, we also relaunched PricingSaaS and would love your feedback. Check it out at pricingsaas.com

Howdy pricing people! On October 8th we've got two special guests: Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt, CEO of Willingness to Pay, and Emil Eriksson, CPO of DigitalRoute. We're going to talk about AI margins, and how to stop them from slipping away as usage grows. The pairing gives both sides: - Ulrik works on strategy: credits, packaging and how to capture value. - Emil works on the technical side: how usage actually gets metered and turned into revenue. We're increasingly seeing a gap in communication between these two groups, and believe tighter collaboration is key for the next phase of AI monetization. A few things we're going to dig into: - How to set credit burn rates when your model costs keep moving - When sending work to cheaper models makes sense, and when it just makes the product worse - What your usage setup needs to track now so you can change pricing later without a rebuild Details below: Thursday, October 8th @ 11am ET Register here 👉 https://luma.com/qdlmss76 Hope to see you there! Rob

Last week we had David Reid, Samuel Little and Pooja Nair from Teneo on PricingSaaS Office Hours. It was a great session, with tons of practical advice on implementing credit models. Here are 5 things from the session I'd want to know if I was rolling out a credit model right now: 1️⃣ Unpredictability loses more deals than price does. In Teneo's work, unpredictability comes up as a loss reason far more often than total price. When customers push back on credits, it's usually about control, not credits themselves. The fix: t-shirt-size bands, forgiving overage in year one, and enterprise contracts that lock in what credits cost at 1M, 10M and 100M. 2️⃣ Get customers used to the counting before you charge. David recommends a 3-month free pilot with monthly value statements: "You used 1,000 credits and saved 500 hours." Charge a small services fee for onboarding, not ARR. That way it never becomes a big, scary approval. 3️⃣ Don't create a new SKU for every AI feature. If a feature doesn't cost much to run, put it in the base platform with a credit allowance. Size that allowance so customers use it up early in the year. Top-up packs are where expansion comes from. (And no one is paying extra for AI summaries anymore.) 4️⃣ 5 to 8 credit burn categories is the sweet spot. Map out the jobs your AI does and you'll find about 50 ways to charge. Put them into 5 to 8 buckets. Keep the subscription and the credit estimate simple. The rate card itself can be more detailed. 5️⃣ Your margins should improve over the life of the contract. Credit models usually target 70 to 85% margin on COGS. Send each task to the cheapest model that does it well and your cost per task keeps falling. With fixed-price credits you keep those savings. With cost-plus pricing you end up passing them on. Dropping the link to the recording and transcript here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/158hWJshwYM3-8pgu2B0bFR4F5a5hxym9?usp=drive_link

Does anyone use an email verification tool for their cold email campaigns? I'm currently using million verifier.com, it seems pretty legit. But just wanted to see if anyone has any recommendations for solid budget friendly tools?