SaaStr AI App of the Week: Willingness to Pay. The Pricing Firm B2B + AI Companies Call When Per-Seat Stops Working

Our AI App of the Week this week … isn’t quite an AI app. But it’s a service that solves one of the toughest problems in B2B + AI today: how to price.

The Bottom Line: Willingness to Pay is Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt’s pricing consultancy, and it’s the shop companies bring in when they realize they’re charging on a model built for a world that no longer exists:

• 200+ pricing redesigns.
• An average of 125 days from signed contract to new pricing live in market.
• Clients like Microsoft, SAP, Samsung, Intel, and Bosch, plus a long bench of PE and VC-backed B2B companies.
• Zero pricing blow-ups across the entire portfolio.
• Nailing pricing is the highest-leverage lever most of you are ignoring, so we’re putting them in front of you.

Why Pricing Is One of the Hardest Problems in B2B + AI Right Now

For about 15 years, B2B pricing was close to solved. Per-seat, three tiers, land and expand. You could copy the playbook off any public company’s pricing page and be roughly right.

AI broke it. Two things changed at once.

First, cost to serve went variable. Every AI action a customer takes costs you real money in tokens and inference. Flat per-seat pricing on top of a variable cost base means your heaviest, happiest users can quietly become your least profitable accounts. You’re subsidizing your own power users.**Second, AI collapses seats.**If one person plus a handful of agents does the work of five, then per-seat pricing charges the customer for headcount you just helped them eliminate. You’re pricing directly against the value you deliver. That math gets worse every quarter.

So the entire field is scrambling toward usage-based, credit-based, and outcome-based models. We featured Helply in this series for exactly this reason: it charges only when AI actually resolves a ticket. The problem is that most teams botch the transition, and the cost of botching it runs both ways. Price too conservatively and you leave 30 to 50% of your revenue on the table. Restructure carelessly and you blow up renewals, confuse your sales team, and torch customer trust in a single billing cycle.

This is the gap Willingness to Pay fills.

What They Actually Do

Two principles drive the work, and both are worth stealing whether or not you ever hire them.

“Price the customer, not the product.“ Most teams build pricing off their own feature list and internal cost. WTP builds it off what the customer actually values and what their next-best alternative costs. That is where willingness to pay actually lives, and it is almost never where the product team assumes it is.

“The money is in the structure.“ The lever is rarely the number on the page. It’s the packaging and metric architecture underneath it: what you meter, how you bundle, where you put the fences between tiers. Across 200+ redesigns, that structural work is what moves revenue. Get the structure right and the price point mostly sets itself.

The other thing that separates them from the average pricing deck: they run it end to end. They design the new model, validate it with your team, your customers, and your channel partners, then roll it out risk-first. New logos see the new pricing first. Then low-risk existing accounts. Strategic accounts come last, only after the model is proven. That sequencing is the entire reason the blow-up count across their portfolio is zero. Changing pricing on a $2M strategic account is not a spreadsheet exercise, and they don’t treat it like one.

They also work on an all-in fixed fee. No upsells, no invented scope, no “phase two” surprise. They’re not incentivized to manufacture more work, which is rarer in consulting than it should be.

The Numbers

200+pricing redesigns completed125 daysaverage from signed contract to new pricing launched- Large average price increases across the portfolio, with the structural redesign doing the heavy lifting, not blunt across-the-board hikes Zeropricing failures or blow-ups

A couple of specific outcomes from their case work: they took a company with a failed pricing model and drove 325% MRR growth in six months. On a separate B2B packaging redesign, they lifted ACV by 100% and grew ARR 37% in the first renewal cycle by adding usage-based components on top of a cleaner package structure. In another, they halved the time to close enterprise deals, because good packaging removes friction from the sales motion, it doesn’t just raise the number.

The AI Angle

WTP runs a dedicated pricing practice for AI products, and a large share of their active book right now is native B2B + AI companies trying to figure out usage and credit models before their competitors do.

Ulrik has become one of the most cited voices on credit-based and usage pricing specifically. He co-authored a definitive guide on prepaid credits for AI companies, and Willingness to Pay is now the exclusive consulting partner of PricingSaaS, which took over WTP’s 500+ person pricing community. If you’re staring at the credits-versus-usage-versus-outcome decision for your AI product and guessing, this is the firm that does that decision for a living.

Why This One Matters

Founders will spend 18 months shaving points off CAC and then leave pricing untouched for three years. That’s backwards. A pricing change ships in a quarter and drops almost entirely to the bottom line. It is the highest-leverage, least-touched lever in the entire B2B stack.

In the AI era it stops being optional. The company that gets its AI monetization structure right in 2026 compounds that advantage for years. The one that keeps bolting an AI feature onto a per-seat SKU gets repriced by a competitor who didn’t. Pricing is no longer a once-a-year finance conversation. It’s core product strategy, and most teams don’t have the in-house reps to get it right on the first try.

You can read Ulrik’s book, The Pricing Roadmap, and do a real amount of this yourself. Or you bring in the people who have run the play 200+ times without a single blow-up. Either way, the takeaway is the same: stop treating pricing as an afterthought in a market where the old model is actively working against you.

Where to Start

Willingness to Pay is a new SaaStr AI partner, so you’ll be seeing more of them. Grab their free The Pricing Roadmap if you haven’t, and if your pricing model still looks like it did before AI changed your cost structure, that’s your signal to take a hard look.

And come meet them in person at SaaStr AI 2027, May 11-12, where they’re a Super Platinum partner. If pricing is on your 2027 roadmap, and it should be, that’s the conversation to have.

SaaStr AI App of the Week is a weekly series on the companies and tools powering the B2B + AI economy. Want to be featured, or sponsor SaaStr AI 2027? Reach out to our team.