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.
Charging for outcomes is hard. Charging for execution is the next best thing, and more realistic for most companies right now. Three recent updates (from Customer.io, Day.ai, and Relay) show how to do it.
Before we get there, here’s what’s going on across the PricingSaaS ecosystem:
Office Hours: Next Thursday, we’ve got a killer session lined up with Fynn Glover, CEO of Schematic. Fynn is my go-to guy for pricing tech questions. We’ll be breaking down how to build a modern pricing architecture that allows you to rapidly iterate on pricing and packaging. Grab your seat →
Revenue Rendezvous: Our friends at Solvimon are hosting a live event in London on Tuesday, June 9th. If you’re in the city and want to jam on AI Monetization, register here.
Pricing Page unPacked: This week, Ulrik and I dropped a new episode of our podcast and went deep on Slack. Listen wherever you get your pods 🎧
🔌 PricingSaaS Partners power the next era of SaaS pricing
This Week in Pricing, Packaging, and Product
Last week we observed 150+ changes. The highlights:
HubSpot cut Breeze AI agent credit costs 50%. See the diff
Google Workspace rolled out annual discounts. See the diff
Zendesk moved Copilot into Suite Enterprise and hid pricing. See the diff
LaunchDarkly shipped new product tiers. See the diff
Pylon restructured the pricing page to introduce AI add ons. See the diff
Replit bumped included credits to $25 in the Core plan. See the diff
Relay added a new "Execution" section to its pricing page. See the diff
Webflow packaged AEO Agents as a new plan feature. See the diff
Monday added Vibe app publishing limits. See the diff
Check out more updates on PricingSaaS →
📩 Newsletter Recommendation: The Science of Scaling
You can have the best pricing model in the world, but poor sales execution will make it worthless. The Science of Scaling runs weekly surveys across 300+ revenue leaders and turns the data into 3 actionable plays per issue — no fluff, no theory. If you're shaping how a product goes to market, it's worth knowing what's happening on the front lines. Subscribe for free.
PricingSaaS Pulse Intelligence
Here’s what was top of mind in Pulse this week:
🔥 Hot Companies
Zendesk — 31 lookups
Notion — 31 lookups
Intercom — 30 lookups
HubSpot — 22 lookups
Freshworks — 19 lookups
🚨 Hot Topics
Price increase strategy — willingness to pay, headroom
AI feature bundling — freemium → paid conversion
Price increase communication — framing, customer backlash
Grandfathering existing customers during a price increase
Anchoring and value framing before raising prices
Forget Outcomes, Charge for Execution
For a while now, we've been told outcome-based pricing is the future. That seats are dead, and SaaS is going to stop selling access and start doing the work for you.
Mostly, it's felt like hype. Very few companies have actually pulled off charging for outcomes. But the part about SaaS doing the work for you is quietly starting to happen.
Over the past few weeks, three companies shipped pricing updates that point toward a more realistic alternative than charging for outcomes: charging for execution. Not features, not credits, not seats. How much work the product does for you, and how sophisticated that work gets, is what determines your cost.
None of them are charging explicitly for outcomes. They may not need to. Each is working execution into its existing model as a hybrid move — which is exactly what makes this realistic where pure outcome-based pricing isn't.
First, Customer.io introduced their AI Agent in beta. Customers can purchase 3 different tiers of their agent, which are differentiated by Custom Execution Skills, Routines, and Routine Frequency.
In other words, you pay more as the agent does work better, faster, or more frequently for you. [Note: We covered this example in more detail a few weeks back. Check it out here.]
Next, Day.ai introduced a similar concept on the CRM side. Day.ai gives away its basic CRM functionality for free, and monetizes with agents that execute work on your behalf. They recently added Automated Skill Slots. Each agent has a defined number of slots, and the skills determine the volume and sophistication of the work they can do for you.
They guide the type of work each agent performs in the description for each agent:
Turbo ($30/mo): Your agent catches action items, drafts follow-ups, and connects to your entire stack. Nothing slips through.
Professional ($75/mo): Your agent runs your pipeline, builds customer lists, generates reports, and works automatically on schedules and events. The work happens without you having to ask.
Executive ($250/mo): Shape how your company uses AI. Configure detailed instructions across your workspace and maintain full administrative control.
Lastly, Relay added a section called Execution to their pricing page, which speaks for itself. The key differentiators are Active Workflows and Concurrent Runs.
Active Workflows dictate the scope of work Relay will execute, while Concurrent Runs determine the volume.
Looking Ahead
Historically, the buyer has always been the operator. Even when it was usage-based (e.g., API calls, messages sent, data ingested), you paid for the right to do the work yourself, just faster or at scale.
Now the software is the operator, and the buyer is becoming the supervisor. With this shift, access is no longer the constraint. The constraint is how much work the system does. This has real consequences for how you package.
Value units change. The companies making the shift are introducing new units — runs, steps, executions, skills — that scale with actual output, not headcount.
Differentiation moves from features to outcomes. When you’re selling execution, you differentiate by what the product can do for users. Differentiation shifts from features to the complexity, volume, or speed of the job.
The upgrade path inverts. Execution shifts the upgrade conversation from “you hit a limit” to “you want more done.” That's a much better growth motion. Limits feel like punishment. Outcomes feel like opportunity.
The Day.ai move is the cleanest illustration of where this is headed. CRMs used to charge you for the privilege of using a system of record. Day.ai gives that part away. The record is table stakes. What you pay for is the agent that actually moves your pipeline. That's the template.
If you're rethinking your pricing model in 2026, start here. Outcome-based pricing might feel like a pipe-dream, and maybe it is for now. Importantly, none of these companies charge for outcomes. But charging for execution is more realistic, and these companies are showing how to make it happen.
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