Dispatches
FIG. 01 What code review becomes → FIG. 02 GTM without a CRM → FIG. 03 The company brain → FIG. 04 Two identical stacks → FIG. 05 Finance builds its own APIs → FIG. 06 Model routing in production → FIG. 07 Knowledge workers don't have GitHub → FIG. 08 Pricing, read from transcripts →
Dispatch 2026-03-28 Company
№08

Pricing, read from transcripts

How customer conversations — not a spreadsheet — moved us to consumption pricing, and what we heard.

Filed by Founder — 6 min
Engraved plate for Pricing, read from transcripts

We changed our pricing model because of what customers said, and we know exactly what they said because every conversation is in the record. This dispatch is the reconstruction — how we read our own transcripts and let them overrule our spreadsheet.

The original model was the enterprise default: per-seat, annual. It priced the thing we found easy to count instead of the thing customers valued, and the transcripts kept surfacing the mismatch. A buyer asking, politely, why they should pay for five hundred seats when the value in the pilot came from eleven procedures running constantly. A champion telling us the CFO understood “we pay when it works” instantly and per-seat never. A security-review call where the sharpest question was not about data at all — it was “what does this cost us if adoption stalls?” Per-seat makes the customer carry adoption risk. They noticed.

So we re-read everything — every pricing conversation across every deal, pulled from the company brain, clustered by objection. The pattern was not subtle. Seats were a fiction both sides maintained: we counted them, customers ignored them, and the real unit of value was work performed — procedures run, artifacts delivered. The customers most excited about the product were the ones effectively asking to buy it like a utility.

We moved to consumption pricing with pilot-to-expansion structures agreed up front: a scoped pilot, pre-agreed criteria for what “working” means, spend that scales with work actually done. The first pilot structured that way converted to a paying contract on the criteria as written — no renegotiation theater.

What we gave up, honestly: revenue predictability got harder, and our own forecasting had to grow up fast. Consumption revenue is earned monthly; nobody coasts on a signature from last January. We consider that a feature aimed at ourselves.

Why publish pricing reasoning at all? Because the way a company prices tells you what it believes about its product. Per-seat says “we believe you’ll assign this to people.” Consumption says “we believe it will do work.” We are betting the company on the second sentence.

— Brendon, Founder, New York

№01 32× — What code review becomes Commit and PR volume at flat headcount since agents became first-class engineers — and how the human job shifted entirely to review. next dispatch

All dispatches → Work on this →