One of the open questions for SaaS and AI pricing in 2026 is the fate of user based pricing. In 2025 there was a lot of interest in credit based pricing. Towards the end of the year there has been pushback, with people as prominent as Marc Benioff from Salesforce predicting that user based pricing will prevail. We disagree. Credit based pricing provides a better answer to the questions of price predictability and price flexibility than does user based pricing. Over the long term, credit based pricing models will push out user based pricing.