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.

Value models integrate different types of information: about the customer, about the improvement claims, about the industry and economy along with assumptions that are part of the model. Bringing these different types of information together drives insights that are not available when the data is managed in silos.

Last fall Ibbaka research found that the most common pricing metric for AI applications was per user. This was confirmed in a recent survey by Kyle Poyar and Palle Broe for Growth Unhinged. What are the reasons for this?

‘Per user’ remains the most common pricing metric in B2B SaaS. But there many different ways to price users. One trending approach is active users. What are the emerging best practices in user based pricing?