Pricing & Packaging

What this layer covers

This is the layer most companies start with, because it's where the pain is most visible: an agent can do the work of several people, and a per seat price has no mechanism to capture that. The layer covers choosing the right value metric, migrating from seat based to consumption or outcome based pricing, and packaging that a finance team can forecast against.

It is also the layer where the most public failures have happened. Repricing three times in eighteen months is not iteration toward the right answer: it's evidence that the unit of value was never actually settled before the pricing page was published.

Why it's breaking now

A pricing model built on activity (conversations, credits, actions) measures attempts, not outcomes, which quietly punishes the vendor for getting more efficient. The model that survives has to progress from seat to consumption to outcome, and it has to keep working when a customer needs less of the product to get the same result: if usage falls while the customer's value rises, the pricing is broken, not the product.