and buyer. For the vendor, usagebased pricing better reflects the variable infrastructure costs of providing software solutions; and for the customer, the idea of “paying only for what you use” seems to beat overspending on unused licenses and the unexpected charges for overuse that can be built into contracts. It’s why finance teams have always struggled with accurately forecasting seat-based pricing models. As it turns out, however, usage-based pricing seems to benefit the former much more than the latter, suggested new research from procurement platform provider Vertice Technology. Since June 2024, the seatbased payment model has seen its dominance drop dramatically, with just 35 percent of companies now using purely seat-based payment models, a decrease in share of 24 percent in only two years, showed the Vertice findings. Pure consumption-based pricing models have increased by 10 percent in the same time period, while hybrid models – which enable a SaaS vendor to monetize additional AI features while maintaining traditional payment structures – have grown by 35 percent. All the while, Vertice’s data showed that switching to a consumption or hybrid pricing model actually increases the contract cost for the customer by an average of 22.6 percent. When switching away from a user-focused pricing model to consumption-based, the cost-per-user increases by up to 37 percent per user. A common scenario finds teams onboarding a tool for one use case but then it gets adopted laterally and consumption climbs. Vertice also noted how vendors were less likely to offer discounts under “pay for what you use” models, meaning business were less able to pay for higher usage caps, leading to higher rates of hitting overages. “While seat-based pricing is a flat ‘all-you-can-eat’ model, usage-based models charge for every action. This leads to higher costs – especially when ‘power users’ are testing new features and typical users are being encouraged to experiment more,” said the Vertice study. As Vertice executives pointed out, controlling costs in consumption-oriented payment models places the onus on the user reducing consumption rather than the vendor granting savings. “This backs buyers into a corner, as no business wants to reduce the usage of their tech stack in order to cut costs or meet a financial redline,” explained the study. Then there is the somewhat controversial practice of “tokenmaxing,” the practice of counting token usage as a measure of productivity, despite how it can incentivize unproductive work over true business gains. As business departments are being pressured to show they are using AI, highlighting spending is an easy way to do it, so usage-based billing would only exacerbates the potential for fiscal inefficiency. “Without real-time visibility and granular guardrails to monitor and throttle token consumption, organizations are risking more than a budget crisis; they are failing a basic requirement of effective technology governance,” warned BetterCloud executives. With a substantial percentage of businesses unable to see the true extent of shadow AI operating within their systems, and AI software vendors increasingly employing usage-based models within AI apps, software spend is about to get significantly more variable and unpredictable. And while it’s the software vendor making all those decisions, it’s likely that customer-facing channel partners will absorb at least some of the customer angst. The time might be sooner than later to inform customers that a robust SaaS management platform can be crucial to solid AI governance. o Pricing model adoption trends & predictions 0 10 20 30 40 50 Adoption % June '24 Jan '25 Jul '25 Jan '26 Jul '26 Jan '27 Seat Based Consumption Pricing Hybrid Pricing Trend Prediction Zone Source: Vertice Technology Percent of Businesses Hitting Overages 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Seat based pricing Hybrid pricing Consumption-based pricing 12.8% 31.6% 43.2% Source: Vertice Technology 39 SUMMER 2026 | CHANNELVISION
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