Vibe coding, agents and credits - our most popular blog posts in 2025
Steven Forth is a principle at Ibbaka and valueIQ. Connect on LinkedIn
The big trends that shaped pricing in 2025 were the emergence of vibe coding, the adoption of agents as a common way to package AI functionality and credit based pricing to price them. Ibbaka covered these trends in its most popular blog posts of 2025.
I went back and looked at people’s predictions for pricing in 2025. Most of us (myself included) were focussed on the impact of costs, how AI could create value, and how that value would be packaged and priced by existing applications.
Jon Miller (MarTech Expert) predicted a fundamental departure from "access-based" pricing (paying for a login) toward outcome-based models, arguing that as AI agents perform more tasks, buyers would demand to pay for "work done" rather than headcount.
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) warned that 2025 would be a "swirling sea of confusion" regarding AI pricing standards; he advised that without a dominant model yet established, vendors would likely spend the year copying each other’s experiments rather than innovating unique pricing structures.
Gartner Analysts projected that while enterprise software spending would grow by over 15%, the majority of this increase would be driven by vendor price hikes (an "AI tax") rather than companies buying more seats, as vendors moved to bundle AI features into core plans.
Rick Koleta (Pricing Strategist) forecasted the dominance of the "Hybrid Model" for 2025, where vendors would pair standard recurring subscriptions with variable consumption fees to protect their margins against the volatile and high compute costs of generative AI.
High Alpha (Venture Capital) predicted a shift in monetization strategy where startups would stop using AI solely as a "loss leader" for growth (Product-Led Growth) and immediately start gating AI features behind higher pricing tiers to prove hard-dollar ROI to increasingly scrutinized IT budgets.
All of these were important, and largely on point, but they were not the key trends that shaped pricing conversations in 2025. These were vibe coding, packaging as agents and credit based pricing.
This is not surprising. Vibe coding did not become a ‘thing’ until February 2025 when Andrej Karpathy introduced the term. Agents had been burbling along in 2024 but few predicted how compelling they would be as a packaging model. And credit based pricing has gained traction in part because of its adoption by vibe coding apps and its fit with families of agents.
As the year unfolded, Ibabka was on top of each of these trends. Our five most popular posts in 2025 were …
How to price AI agents (April)
Why tokens and credits are becoming a standard approach to pricing AI solutions (March)
Agent strategies at the major pricing software vendors (July)
Part of an ongoing series on agent strategies in different B2B categoriesComparing the Value Model and Pricing Model of Intercom’s Fin AI Agent (February)
The most popular Ibbaka post in 2025 though was from back in 2024. The Evolution of AI Pricing Models: From Consumption to Hybrid and Generative Approaches, published in October 2024, had more than 3,000 views in 2025. The evolution of AI pricing is a compelling theme. This post is in need of updating, which we will do soon, as part of our work on pricing trends for 2026.
Navigating the new pricing environment brought by AI agents? Contact us @ info@ibbaka.com
