AI-driven efficiency is killing seat-based SaaS pricing. When a customer reduces a team from 10 people to 3, they just eliminated 70% of your potential revenue. Lee Bridges, a veteran product manager, recently led a pricing transformation that confronted this reality head-on. His solution: outcome-based pricing that charges customers when they achieve measurable results tied to their revenue, not when they add users. The key insight? Traditional per-seat pricing misaligns incentives—vendors want more users, customers want fewer. Outcome-based pricing flips this: "If I give you a dollar and you're going to give me $10 back, I'd be insane to not do that as many times as I can." Lee shares how his field service software reduced quote preparation from 20 minutes per asset to 90 seconds—a massive efficiency gain that would devastate seat-based revenue. Instead, they charge per quoted asset using tiered prepayment credits. The conversation also tackles why B2B SaaS isn't dying despite AI hype (consistency and training matter), vibe coding realities, and why expecting everyone to become a product manager through LLM interfaces is unrealistic. Bottom line: If you're charging per seat and building AI features, you're on a burning platform.
AI is fundamentally changing how SaaS companies should think about pricing. When your software makes teams 70% more efficient, charging per seat means you're literally shrinking your own market. In this conversation, product management veteran Lee Bridges explains why seat-based pricing is a burning platform and what comes next.
Lee, returning to the podcast after five years, recently led a pricing transformation project that forced him to confront an uncomfortable truth: AI-driven efficiency gains directly reduce the number of seats customers need. His solution? Outcome-based pricing that aligns incentives between vendors and customers while future-proofing against AI disruption.
Lee Bridges - Cheif Product Officer at Inn-Flow, father, audio engineer, and vibe coder who recently completed a major pricing transformation project for a B2B SaaS company in the field service space.
The Seat-Based Pricing Problem
Outcome-Based Pricing Explained
Real-World Implementation
The Future of SaaS and AI
"If you create efficiencies that make a process so efficient that some number of people will no longer be necessary... you reduce the number of potential seats. You reduce the Tam."
"If I give you a dollar and you're going to give me $10 back, I'd be insane to not do that as many times as I can."
"You're really expecting everyone on Earth to be a product manager. That's just not going to happen."
"The most people don't have a high level of agency. They don't know what they want, when they want it, and they don't know how to describe it."