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In 2025, I had the same conversation dozens of times.
It usually started with excitement.
“We launched AI features.”
“Our customers love it.”
“Usage is growing fast.”
Then, a pause.
“But we are nervous.”
“We do not really know how to control it.”
“Our CFO is asking questions we cannot answer yet.”
“Our CIO/CTO is scared of runaway costs.”
“Our customers are asking for visibility and control.”
This was not a pricing problem.
And it was not a billing problem either.
It was a governance problem.
And it took most of us too long to admit it.
The Uncomfortable Truth About AI Monetization
AI did not just add a new feature to software.
It changed who or what actually uses your product.
In many modern systems, the primary actor is no longer a human clicking buttons.
It is an autonomous workflow.
An agent.
A background process making decisions, triggering actions, and consuming resources continuously.
Your customer is still a company.
But your user is often an algorithm.
That single shift breaks almost every assumption we inherited from the last decade of SaaS.
Seats do not make sense.
Pure usage pricing creates fear instead of trust.
Invoices arrive too late to prevent damage.
And most billing systems only see the outcome, not the intent, the policy, or the guardrails.
We tried to solve this with better pricing pages.
With more SKUs.
With creative meters.
It did not work.
Because the real problem is not how much to charge.
It is how to control consumption before it becomes a problem.
Why Usage-Based Pricing Alone Is Not the Answer
Usage-based pricing was supposed to align value with cost.
In practice, for AI, it often does the opposite.
For builders, it creates anxiety.
For finance teams, it creates unpredictability.
For buyers, it creates mistrust.
What customers are actually asking for is not cheaper usage.
They are asking for clarity.
How much can this system spend?
Who is allowed to trigger it?
What happens when we cross a threshold?
Can we approve, pause, downgrade, or reroute behavior in real time?
These are not billing questions.
They are product questions.
And most companies today answer them with spreadsheets, Slack messages, and hope.
That does not scale.
The pricing debate is loud because it is unresolved
“Seats are dead.”
“No, seats are back.”
“Usage is the future.”
“Credits are better.”
“Outcomes will replace everything.”
All of these statements are partially true and mostly useless.
The reason this debate dominates 2025 is not because pricing models matter more than ever.
It is because pricing has become the only lever teams can easily talk about.
Pricing is visible.
Architecture is not.
So the market argues about the symptom. This debate misses the point.
Pricing only defines how you charge after value is consumed. Agentic systems force a much harder question: who or what is allowed to consume value in the first place, under which limits, and with what consequences.
Until teams can answer that confidently, no pricing model will feel safe.
The Missing Layer in the Modern AI Stack
For years, we treated monetization as a back-office concern.
Product builds features.
Engineering ships logic.
Billing invoices whatever happened.
That mental model is now broken.
Modern software needs a control plane for monetization.
A layer that sits between product behavior and financial outcomes.
A layer that understands entitlements, policies, limits, budgets, and approvals.
A layer that operates in real time, not 30 days later on an invoice.
Think about how identity evolved.
Authentication used to be embedded everywhere.
Then we centralized it.
Then it became strategic infrastructure.
Monetization is going through the same transition right now.
In 2026, companies will not ask, “How do we bill for this?”
They will ask, “How do we govern it?”
Agentic Usage Management: Naming the Shift
Every market transition needs a name.
Here is mine.
Agentic Usage Management.
It is the idea that access, usage, and cost are no longer granted to static users.
They are granted to systems that act autonomously.
Agentic usage management is not about charging per token or per call.
It is about defining who or what is allowed to act, within which boundaries, under which policies, and with what consequences.
It includes:
- Entitlements that are dynamic, not static
- Budgets that are enforced, not observed
- Limits that trigger behavior, not just alerts
- Approvals that are part of product flow
- Auditability that finance can trust
This is not a theory.
This is what real customers are asking for now.
Five Predictions for 2026
Here is where I believe the market is headed.
1. AI Spend Governance Will Become a Default Product Requirement
Enterprise buyers will not accept AI features without controls.
“Unlimited usage” will be seen as reckless, not generous.
Products without guardrails will lose deals.
2. Monetization Will Get Runtime SLOs
Teams will track monetization incidents the same way they track outages.
Unexpected overages will be treated as failures, not surprises.
3. Billing Systems Will Stay, But They Will No Longer Be Enough
Stripe, Zuora, and others will continue to power invoicing and revenue recognition.
But they will not be the place where product decisions live.
Integration-first architectures will win.
4. Product, Engineering, and Finance Will Finally Share the Same Language
Not through meetings, but through systems.
When entitlements, usage, and cost live in one control plane, alignment follows.
5. The Best Companies Will Design Trust Into Their Monetization
Predictability will beat cleverness.
Control will beat surprise.
Transparency will beat optimization tricks.
What We Changed Internally After Seeing This Firsthand
Building in this market forced us to change how we think as a company.
We stopped asking, “How do we support more pricing models?”
We started asking, “How do we help teams sleep at night?”
That shift influenced everything.
- How we design entitlements
- How we think about AI credits and budgets
- How we integrate instead of replace existing billing systems
- How we talk to engineers, finance leaders, and executives differently
It also forced discipline.
Not every feature belongs in the billing layer.
Not every decision should be hard-coded into product logic.
And not every monetization problem is a pricing problem.
Most are governance problems disguised as pricing debates.
A Message to Builders Entering 2026
If you are building AI-powered software, ask yourself honestly:
Do you know who is allowed to consume value in your system?
Do you know when and why they cross limits?
Can you stop damage before it happens?
Can your customers understand and trust what will happen next?
If the answer relies on manual processes, contracts, or hope, you are exposed.
This is not about fear.
It is about responsibility.
The more powerful our software becomes, the more intentional its boundaries must be.
Closing Thought
In the early days of SaaS, access was the product.
Then features were the product.
Then experience became the product.
In the next chapter, control becomes the product.
Not control over users.
Control over systems that act on our behalf.
The companies that win in 2026 will not be the ones that monetize the fastest.
They will be the ones that monetize with the most trust.
That is the future Stigg, and myself, are building toward.
