2025 will be remembered as the year when seemingly everybody lost confidence in their pricing. Among the top 500 players in SaaS and AI with transparent pricing, there were more than 1,800 pricing changes in 2025 alone.

That’s a staggering 3.6 pricing changes per company. Some, like Lovable, made a meaningful pricing change every 👏 single 👏 month in 2025.

I enlisted help from Rob Litterst at PricingSaaS to give readers a tactical rundown of what happened and what (if anything) seems to be working in SaaS pricing.

Here’s the TL;DR. Read the full post here:

Trend 1: Credit models exploded in popularity, up 126% YoY

Most credits models fall into one of four buckets based on this 2x2: (a) is it more customer-friendly or vendor-friendly? & (b) are credits cost-based or value-based?

- AI credits as product feature (see: HubSpot, Adobe)

- AI credits as a creative sandbox (see: Lovable, Replit)

- AI credits as enterprise infra (see: Figma, Cursor)

- AI credits as a pass-through utility (see: Clay, PostHog)

Trend 2: The great re-bundling of AI

The more credit models flood the marketplace, the more customers will want to return to simplicity. In 2025 the pendulum swung toward credits. In 2026 it'll likely swing back toward simplicity and predictability.

Some of the biggest names in SaaS -- including Notion, Slack & Loom -- launched their first AI product as an add-on, and have since bundled that functionality into their core pricing model. Each had charged between $4 to $10 per user for an AI add-on. Now they're bundling AI and raising prices by between $2.50 and $5 per user.

Trend 3: Making seat-based pricing work harder

As companies introduce more complex pricing models, seats look customer-friendly by comparison.

Companies doing this well are layering additional value dimensions on top of the seat. Instead of a seat being just permission to log in, a seat becomes a gateway to more product capability, more automation, more consumption, more outcomes, or more flexibility.

Trend 4: The emergence of choose-your-own-pricing

For the past decade, vendors held most of the leverage: long-term contracts, rigid license models, and extractive pricing practices were staples of the legacy playbook.

AI breaks that model. The demand for optionality is reshaping how SaaS companies think about pricing.

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The full report has a ton of different examples & screenshots to help you shape your 2026 pricing strategy. Hope you find it useful.

-KP