How to Build Trust with Usage-Based Pricing

Welcome back to Good Better Best.

Each week, we break down real pricing, packaging, and product moves from SaaS and AI leaders and share the ideas worth stealing.

This week, I’m sharing my notes from an interview with my friend Fynn Glover, CEO of Schematic. We talked about the trust gap in usage-based pricing, why trust is more important than ever, and what leading teams can do to differentiate.

We also discussed Schematic’s newest launch, Enterprise Wallet, and how it solves this exact problem. Let’s get to it.

This week we observed 209 changes across the companies we track. Here are the highlights:

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Earlier this week, Fynn and the Schematic team launched Enterprise Wallet, a suite of tools that allows customers to offer real-time usage tracking, granular consumption breakdowns, and usage controls all within an embeddable UI.

I sat down with Fynn to talk about the launch, and a couple minutes in he dropped a banger: billing either builds trust or it breaks trust.

The line hit home. I had recently (barely) exceeded my AI credit limit with a vendor, and rather than sending an email asking if I wanted to upgrade, they sent one saying they had already upgraded my plan for me. Needless to say, the move eroded my trust.

This week, we Fynn and I co-hosted an Office Hours session where several pricing leaders shared their own stories from the trenches as they’ve shifted from seat-based licenses to consumption models. The biggest takeaway is that trust has become more important than ever, and most companies are finding that out the hard way.

In Fynn’s view, trust is a combination of visibility and governance. While most companies offer visibility, far fewer companies really put control in the customer’s hands. Here's the line from our interview that reframed this for me:

Visibility is the easy part. A credit counter, a bar chart, or a "you've used 62% of your plan" banner. Most teams are shipping that, and it’s rarely differentiated.

Governance is the hard part. Governance is the customer being able to do something about what they're looking at. For example:

As teams grow more sophisticated using AI tools, this level of granularity becomes truly necessary.

Runaway bills were happening long before AI, but the emergence of agents has raised the stakes. As Fynn told me, products are no longer used by the number of people who bought seats — it's used by every agent they point at it as well.

One of his enterprise customers described Fortune 500 buyers running fleets of agents through their product at rates the vendor couldn't control. But while usage can explode, budgets can't. That Fortune 500 buyer might be able to spend more with you, but they cannot spend infinitely. The whole game for the next few years is governing that gap.

This week, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon shared a similar sentiment when asked about layering on usage-based pricing for Okta’s products.

If you need further proof that this layer is now strategic, just look at Stripe agreeing to acquire OpenRouter — a $7B bet that usage governance will be critical to the next frontier of billing software.

During our discussion and the Office Hours session, Fynn kept returning to three words: visibility, predictability, and control. He says if you make those deeply true of how you price, the trust problem mostly solves itself.

He also shared four considerations that help.

1. Turn the feature and spend cap on by default. Fynn's favorite example of a company that does this well is Supabase. On paid tiers, they turn AI features on by default, but also turn a default spend cap on by default. When a user hits their covered limit, they gracefully degrade performance with clear alerting instead of a wall. This is a great example of protecting customers by handing over the controls rather than withholding the product.

2. Ship the controls before the meter. During Office Hours, one pricing leader discussed a recent AI product launch that received pushback from customers because governance requirements weren’t ready to go at launch. By giving admins permission controls 30 days before a credit-consuming feature goes GA, it allows them to plan usage accordingly, or turn the feature off to avoid surprises.

3. Talk openly about overages and throttling preferences. This one is psychological, not technical. Some customers want you to cut them off before a runaway bill. Others would rather eat the overage than break a workflow. The only wrong answer is not having asked. If you're not throttling, you both need to be aligned on what that means for the invoice.

4. Be honest about buy versus build. Billing has always oscillated, and there's a fashionable swing back toward building in-house right now. Fynn's rule: build this only if you firmly believe usage governance is core to your product's innovation. Otherwise buy it, because the vendors doing it full-time have absorbed hundreds of feature requests you haven't thought of yet. Build it yourself and you'll ship the six things you anticipated. You won't ship the twenty you didn't.

One notable takeaway from Office Hours — none of this is just a pricing project. The teams who've made it to the other side of a transition to usage describe a long list of operational processes that were critical to their success, including:

If it feels like you’re getting too granular, you’re probably on the right track.

Schematic's Enterprise Wallet is the implementable answer to the argument above. Headless components that show usage against commit in real time, break it down by feature, user, workspace, and agent, and let the customer set their own spend caps by user, role, or agent type.

If you're moving into consumption pricing, grab 30 minutes with Fynn to learn more. It’ll be worth the time even if you end up building it yourself.

Thanks for reading! If you’re working on AI monetization and want to learn more about how we help, book time here.

Until next time,

Rob