You know that feeling when you’re looking at your competitor’s pricing page and the math doesn’t add up?
$9/month. Unlimited usage. Same features as your $900 enterprise plan.
Your first thought: They’re burning VC money. Classic Silicon Valley playbook – grow at all costs, figure out margins later. You’ve seen this movie before. They’ll either raise prices or die. Just like Uber did for a decade.
The math you may not want to admit
DocuSign charges thousands of dollars a month for seats. Document agents do it for $0.50 per document (or less) – complete category extinction.
The median SaaS company we track has 500 employees and 10 years of technical debt. Their agent competitor has 5 employees and zero legacy code.
Guess who ships faster?
The uncomfortable pattern
Here’s what happens next. I’ve seen it three times this month already:
Week 1: “It’s just a toy. Our enterprise customers need real features.” Week 8: “They raised $30M but they’ll burn through it.” Week 16: “Our customers are asking about them in QBRs.” Week 24: “Emergency board meeting – revenue down 40%.” Week 32: “Exploring strategic alternatives.”
The crazy part? 89% of SaaS companies don’t realize they’re already in Week 8. The other 11% are frantically rebuilding everything.
Your two options
You can pretend this isn’t happening. Add some ChatGPT features. Call yourself “AI-powered.” Raise prices 20%. Watch your churn rate climb while telling yourself it’s just macro headwinds.
Or you can face reality: The per-seat model is dead. Your competitor’s agent doesn’t care about your SAM, your TAM, or your customer success team. It just works. For much much less.
Salesforce saw this coming. They killed their own $30B seat-based model and switched to charging per outcome with Agentforce. They’d rather cannibalize themselves than let someone else do it.
What’s your plan when enterprises stop buying seats? They’re trying to replace you – and they won’t need to try too hard.
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