Why 95% of AI startups get pricing wrong, from the field's leading advisor.
Pricing and scaling your AI product | Madhavan Ramanujam
Lenny's Podcast (Madhavan Ramanujam) Jul 2025
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Per-seat pricing breaks when your product replaces labor instead of assisting it: agents don't have seats. The market is converging on usage and outcome pricing (Intercom charges $0.99 per AI-resolved ticket, Zendesk per automated resolution, Salesforce $2 per conversation), usually wrapped in a hybrid: a platform fee plus variable consumption. Anchor your price to the value of completed work, agree contractually on what counts as an outcome, and watch your token costs so an unlucky customer doesn't make you lose money per task.
18 resources.
Why 95% of AI startups get pricing wrong, from the field's leading advisor.
Lenny's Podcast (Madhavan Ramanujam) Jul 2025
Open lennysnewsletter.com →The listenable version: AI products can capture 25-50% of value created.
Lenny's Podcast Jul 2025
Listen on Spotify open.spotify.com →A candid founder-to-founder chat on making outcome pricing actually work.
Cheeky Pint (Stripe) 2025
Open cheekypint.substack.com →The evidence that base-plus-usage hybrids outperform pure models.
Revenue Creator (Kyle Poyar) 2025
Open revenuecreator.com →The company that popularized charging per resolution explains its own model.
Sierra (Bret Taylor's team) 2025
Open sierra.ai →The investor-grade case for why agent pricing had to change.
a16z Dec 2024
Open a16z.com →Patterns from 60+ agent companies distilled into a usable framework.
Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) 2025
Open growthunhinged.com →Real price points: $2/conversation, $0.99/resolution, per-task AI SDRs.
Kyle Poyar 2025
Open substack.com →The diagnostic to run before you copy anyone's agent pricing.
Kyle Poyar (Growth Unhinged) 2025
Open growthunhinged.com →The quick summary thread before you commit 90 minutes.
Lenny Rachitsky Jul 2025
Open x.com →An India-founded billing leader's data on outcome and value models.
Chargebee 2025
Open chargebee.com →A catalogue of every live agent pricing model with examples.
Monetizely 2026
Open getmonetizely.com →The billing-infrastructure view of metering agents without angering customers.
Flexprice 2026
Open flexprice.io →The structural argument: agents don't log in, so seats can't price them.
MindStudio 2026
Open mindstudio.ai →A quick taxonomy to pick your starting model in an afternoon.
Pickaxe 2026
Open pickaxe.co →How enterprise buyers expect to budget for agents, useful in negotiations.
Deloitte 2026
Open deloitte.com →What incumbents are doing to their pricing, so you can position against it.
RSM US 2025
Open rsmus.com →Includes the practical bit others skip: define 'resolved' in the contract.
SoftwareSeni 2026
Open softwareseni.com →The same ground, over in Build the product, our Starting Up track.