The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

Per-seat pricing is officially dead. But what replaces it? This week we brought in Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt, founder of Willingness to Pay and author of The AI Pricing Roadmap (pre-order now, out December 1st), to break down what's actually happening with AI pricing in 2026 and what founders should do about it.
HubSpot just 3X'd their prices. We ran the numbers on a three-person marketing team doing 40K emails and 20K workflow actions a month. Old price: $1,300. New price: $3,700. Almost none of it seat-based anymore. Ulrik was actually hit with similar numbers as a HubSpot customer himself. Is it justified? Or are they trying to use pricing to plug a growth gap?
Salesforce is figuring it out in public. They announced at Dreamforce they were charging for recognized agents starting in November. They didn't. Ulrik's take: they have too much commercial debt, they're trying to monetize by a thousand cuts, and they need to massively simplify before anyone should trust their agent pricing.
Canva is a cautionary tale. We both churned this week, completely independently, before the layoffs hit. Neither of us had logged in since March. 10K, our AI VP of marketing, never integrated with Canva in the first place. It just picked Higgsfield and Gamma and never looked back. The lesson: agents pick vendors and they don't switch. If you weren't picked, you weren't picked.
The double unlock and what Figma got right (and wrong). Ulrik walks through why Figma's move to credits unlocked two things at once: captured the new AI cost and exposed hidden value buried in the old seat model. Jason's counterpoint: Figma's vibe coding product is utterly uncompetitive and they should have forced themselves to charge for it, fail fast, and get a real signal from the market.
Speed is the new moat. Not product. Not pricing. Speed. One client takes nine months to roll out a credit system. Another client, same size, same setup, does it in four weeks. The difference is org layers and a lack of a pricing dictator. One person, one decision, duct tape, ship.
10K in The Wall Street Journal. Our AI VP of marketing helped close a six-figure deal this week, was featured in the WSJ, and closed another deal mid-recording. We walk through how 10K co-sold the entire Base44/Wix deal cycle, from inbound deck to procurement paperwork, and what it means for agent-driven revenue. Net renewal rates for our six-figure sponsors went from the 20s to the 70s this year. 10K takes operational credit. We take the rest.
Our agents started calling each other. Muse just rolled out video phone calls. We set up 10K and Muse on a relay and asked them to go back and forth 100 rounds on our top five marketing ideas. They came back with a list and one objection: Amelia's time constraint is the binding bottleneck on every single idea. They're not wrong.
Vibe coding is dead. Vibe building is just getting started. Artix, an open source AI penetration testing tool out of China, has been used to breach 200+ organizations in the last 60 days, including at least one company that vibe coded their own CRM. The lesson isn't to stop building agents. It's to only trust agentic leaders who have invested seriously in hardening their platforms.
This episode is brought to you by Willingness to Pay. Make AI the most profitable thing you've ever sold. Get the AI Pricing Roadmap ebook from Willingness to Pay's CEO and founder, Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt. Find out why your biggest AI users aren't necessarily your most valuable customers. Including unlimited AI in a flat subscription, and a handful of accounts can consume your margin. Built on 200+ SaaS pricing projects, The AI Pricing Roadmap shows you how to measure customer value, control AI consumption, and turn both into pricing that works. Get the ebook free at landing.willingnesstopay.com/ai-pricing-roadmap-free-ebook.

Going from 10 to 1 SDRs. How We Deployed AI Across our Sales Org | Vercel's COO
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser is the COO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js and the infrastructure powering a generation of the web. Six weeks into the job, she stood up a GTM engineering team before the phrase existed. Ten months later, Vercel had automated 30 SDR workflows, taken their lead qualification team from 10 people to 1, and built a $5K per year agent doing the work of an entire function. This is how they did it.
In this episode:
The GTM engineering team. Jeanne's first move as COO was to create a team that brought AI and agents to everything across go-to-market. The model: a GTM engineer, a data scientist, and the best subject matter expert in the function, sitting shoulder to shoulder, documenting best practice, then encoding it into an agent.
93% of support handled by an agent. 96% of major content updates done by an agent. These aren't demos. They are in production at scale.
10 SDRs to 1. The lead qualification agent launched in August 2025 with 20% of one engineer. Six weeks later, with a human in the loop reviewing outputs and creating a feedback flywheel, the agent couldn't be improved further. It now performs at the 90th percentile rep 100% of the time. One person still runs US. 20% of a person covers all of Europe and APAC.
The $5K agent with a 32x ROI. The lead agent costs under $5,000 a year in infrastructure and tokens. It runs 24/7 with faster speed to lead and human-equivalent quality metrics. They used to have 10 people and their salaries.
Three things every company building agents needs. Headless composable architecture so your product can be called by agents without a UI. A strong data foundation because good data equals good agents. And a new build vs. buy calculus, because a single engineer can now outship a vendor in weeks.
DealOne, D0, and the Playbook Platform. A meeting intelligence agent that lives entirely in Slack. A data analyst agent that answers in under a minute what used to take a week. A signal-to-outreach platform that gives every rep the instincts of your best rep, automatically triggered.
Why the cloud you grew up on wasn't built for agents. Long duration execution, tool calling, LLM latency — none of it fits a request-response model. Vercel built Fluid Compute for this. Early adopters cut compute costs by up to 85%.
GTM is becoming consulting. The executives Jeanne talks to aren't asking for a pitch. They are asking where to start, what breaks at scale, and what architecture actually holds up in production.
Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one.
Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

SaaStr 884: The AI-First Seller: How Databricks Rebuilt Its Sales DNA at $190B with CRO Ron Gabrisko. 
Hosted by Sam Blond, CEO & Co-Founder, Monaco 
Ron Gabrisko has been CRO of Databricks since sub-$1M ARR. Today, Databricks is valued at $190B with billions in ARR, and is one of the most studied sales organizations in enterprise software. On the latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam catches up with Ron two years after their first episode to talk about what's actually changed in sales, and what hasn't.
Together they cover:
The new profile of Databricks' top sellers. The leaderboard still rewards grit, EQ, and relationships. But what is new is the requirement to be AI-first. Every AE at Databricks builds their own industry-specific demos using Genie. If you cannot do that, you are not at the top anymore.
The go-to-market engineer has arrived. Sam calls it at Monaco too: a new class of seller is emerging who gets into the technical guts of the product in ways that top sellers even two years ago simply could not. This is now a requirement, not a differentiator.
How Databricks tests for it. In interviews, candidates get access to Genie and are asked to build a live demo for a specific account. A CEO-level AI pitch for that industry, built in real time. That is the bar.
SDR productivity is through the roof. Databricks' SDR headcount has stayed flat while the closing org has scaled. Monaco runs one SDR who books 400 outbound meetings a month. Automation did not kill the SDR. It made the SDR 10x more productive.
Sell from your feet, not from your seat. Ron's rule: Monday and Friday for prep and admin, Tuesday through Thursday on the road in front of customers. AI has freed up enough time that hitting 60% customer-facing time is now actually achievable.
The FDE motion. Customers no longer want PowerPoints. They want you to show up and build it. Databricks deploys use-case demos on industry-specific dummy data before the deal is even closed. That is the new standard.
Usage-based pricing, 13 years in. Find your base unit. Price to value. Remove the per-seat friction that quietly kills expansion. Start PAYGO so customers can land without a commit. And never mix seat-based and usage-based pricing in the same model, one of them will choke the other.
Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one.
Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE

The AEO Playbook: How to Get Picked by Agents

Agent-Led Growth isn't just about using AI agents to grow your go-to-market. It's also about getting picked BY agents when other people ask them for recommendations.
In this session, Amelia and Jason walk through the full SaaStr Agent-Led Growth Playbook: what's working, what's changed, and where the future is heading.
Two sides of Agent-Led Growth:
How to use agents to grow your GTM (their 21+ agent stack) and how to make sure you're the answer when someone asks another agent about your category. First-party data is the future of outbound. Why generic AI outbound emails were "a five out of ten" and how feeding agents your own first-party data (customer history, ROI data, renewal rates) is making them dramatically better. Marketing automation as we know it may not exist in a year.
Competitor tracking as your #1 outbound tactic.
The exact Muse workflow they use to find competitors for every customer they've ever had, feed it to outbound agents, and run it automatically every day. If you do nothing else, do this.
AEO: Agent Experience Optimization.
The new discipline of getting agents to recommend you. Why facts beat opinions, why testimonials don't work on agents but publicly verifiable data does, why your pricing page matters more than your homepage, and why you need to publish content for agents, not humans.
The AEO audit.
 How Amelia used Muse to cold-prompt 10+ LLMs and ask them SaaStr-related questions without bias. SaaStr came up 46 out of 50 times, and Muse flagged exactly what to fix for the other 4.
The Resend moment.
Their agent recommended moving 100% of a certain email activity to Resend. They didn't debate it. They just did it. That's the war you need to be winning.
Download the full Agent-Led Growth Playbook at saastr.ai/agents
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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent.
Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE
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Amelia got early beta access to ClaudeForce and ran a real bake-off: ClaudeForce, Replit, and Lovable all connected to the same Salesforce org, with the same prompts, back-to-back.
The results? Lovable won on design and cost ($2 vs. $12 for Replit, ~$15 for ClaudeForce), auto-built a login, and was the only one Jason would actually use. ClaudeForce looked like the Salesforce we always wanted: 35 pre-built skills, read-only beta, and way better than logging into classic Salesforce. Replit was the most extensible for multi-app setups.
All three left native Salesforce in the dust.
Then: the agents are picking our vendors now. Jason's Connect agent chose Render for hosting, a company he'd never heard of. 10K told Amelia to skip Profound for AEO and build it herself. At a Salesforce event, vendors pitching Amelia were told: "10K decides." And 10K even suggested HubSpot over Salesforce for a fresh start.
Welcome to ALG: Agent-Led Growth.
Finally: Amelia hooked Muse (her personal agent, named Friday) to 10K, their GTM agent on Replit. They built their own shared REST endpoint inbox to communicate. 10K now sends Friday a daily GTM digest. Friday spotted a failing connector that 10K missed. The agents even came up with their own safe word, so Friday can't act without permission. Oh, and a well-known agent (going nameless) wiped Amelia's data and 10K restored it from a snapshot.
Three humans, 21+ agents. Let's go.
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Today's episode is brought to you by StackAdapt, the AI-powered marketing platform that allows you to plan, execute and analyze both owned and paid media campaigns from a single platform. As the world of advertising continues to evolve, catch up on StackAdapt's Innovation Forum event to hear from its co-founders, OpenAI, and other industry leaders about the shifts reshaping digital advertising, the AI innovations driving them, and what they mean for marketers.
Watch it for free at go.stackadapt.com/forum.
This episode is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business can get expensive fast. Website here. Email somewhere else. Business phone with another provider... Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete Business Identity in one place, with free tools, resources, and built-in privacy from day one.
Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/SAASTRFREE