Pricing Page unPacked

Linear sells AI with no markup on model tokens, and that one choice says a lot about how it plans to grow. The Basic and Business plans are priced per seat, $10 and $16 per user a month, while coding sessions and loops run on prepaid credits shown in dollars that the pricing page barely mentions. With no margin on the AI there is nothing to discount, so the price stays firm, the credits cannot be refunded or passed on, and developers get a cost they can explain and expect to last. Linear reports more than 40.000 paying companies, $100 million in annual recurring revenue and 177% net revenue retention, so the adoption side is clearly working.

The harder question is how Linear ever charges its biggest customers. A team of 100 on Business pays about $1.600 a month, and the only step above that is a custom Enterprise plan, so the largest accounts have no obvious way to pay what the product is worth to them. Giving every plan the features that drive adoption, and charging for triage and control once the volume arrives, would be one route; buying model capacity below list price and keeping the spread, the way cloud resellers did, would be another. Linear can already cost more than Jira, closer to Superhuman charging for email than to a classic low-price challenger, and developer tools are among the hardest products to price: the user wants free, the enterprise buyer has a budget, and the craft is knowing when to switch.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction
1:38 Linear, the anti-Jira built for AI agents
4:10 What $100 million ARR says about the long tail
5:36 Four plans priced per seat
6:25 Can a $16 seat monetise the biggest teams?
9:17 Give away what drives adoption, charge for control
12:57 AI credits hidden in the fine print
14:13 No markup: AI as a pass-through
16:49 Dollar credits, top-ups and no discounts
20:36 Bring your own key and the reseller spread
23:31 Linear vs Jira: a challenger that costs more
25:14 A premium for a better tool, and pricing developer tools
28:05 Buy, hold or sell: the verdict

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page every week and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow. No slides, no scripts.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

Notion has started charging for AI with credits, and the way it has done it says a lot about where the company is heading. Business and Enterprise seats now come with two kinds of credit: Standard credits for work where Notion picks the model, and Select credits for work where you pick it, plus account-level Notion credits that admins can buy to top up either. Behind the complexity sits a bigger shift. A flat price per seat could never reach the customers who get the most out of Notion, and charging for AI usage might, so value-based pricing is quietly arriving with AI, pushed there by the cost of running AI as much as by design.

The trouble is that the credits are tied to seats. In most teams a few heavy users run out while everyone else leaves theirs untouched, so customers end up buying more credits while still holding plenty, and the friction lands on the very people who drive adoption. From there it is a question of what Notion wants to be: a system of record, a system of action, or both. The Assets-Actions Matrix maps what an AI product should charge for, and Notion's model router, Auto, and bring-your-own AI show it trying to win on convenience, cost and flexibility at once. Margins in SaaS start to look like a hyperscaler problem, and the launch, learn, monetise sequence suggests this pricing is a stage on the way, with credits pooled across seats the likely next step.

IN THIS EPISODE

0:00 Intro
0:18 From an AI add-on to credits, Notion's AI pricing so far
6:58 Value-based pricing arrives with AI, and credits tied to seats
18:05 System of record or system of action
21:18 The Assets-Actions Matrix
25:11 Auto, bring your own AI and the case for an enablement fee
32:29 Two credit pools, and where Notion goes next

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page every week and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow. No slides, no scripts.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

Lovable sells credits, with no seats at the entry tier, and its pricing page opens with a puzzle: the Pro and Business plans both start at $50 a month. The difference sits in the credit. Business buys half as many for the same money, and that premium pays for team features such as role-based access, team workspaces and SSO. Putting one number on both plans makes them easy to compare, and it gets harder to defend as an account grows, because a large customer pays double on every credit for a handful of admin features.

From there it is credit policy and go-to-market. Rollovers that sound generous on annual plans and change almost nothing, top-ups at a 20 percent premium that people buy anyway in the middle of a build, and free credit grants and weekend promotions that feel closer to a consumer app than to SaaS. Then the enterprise layer, where Lovable will send a forward deployed engineer to build for you, and why services like that keep paying back in consumption long after the invoice. Underneath it all is the awkward fact behind most AI credit models: nobody can tell you in advance what a credit buys.

IN THIS EPISODE

0:00 Intro
2:02 Two $50 plans, rollovers and free credit grants
15:27 Feature types, two credit pools and regional pricing
25:44 Top-ups, and a platform fee in disguise
30:42 Forward deployed engineers and the case for services
39:45 Nobody knows what a credit buys
43:13 The verdict, buy hold or sell

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

A decade ago every founder wanted to price like HubSpot. Now they want to price like Clay, the poster child for credit-based pricing in the AI era. In March 2026 Clay split its pricing into data credits, spent enriching contacts, and actions, spent running the workflows built on that data. With enrichment data getting cheaper everywhere, the money has moved to the work, and actions keep growing as an account gets more sophisticated even when its data stays the same.

The episode also takes the pricing page apart: plan gates that hold back the very features that drive consumption, two credit pools where one might do, and the agency tier Clay has not built yet. Then credit policy, from why every credit model ends up offering rollovers to why a partial rollover is barely better than none.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

Canva's free plan has already reached almost everyone it was ever going to reach. Canva says 95 percent of the Fortune 500 use it, and that is the moment most freemium companies never plan for: the free tier stops being an acquisition engine and turns into a conversion problem, with growth having to come from the users already inside rather than from new ones. 

This episode breaks down the live Canva pricing page to see how a company monetises a base it has already saturated, from where the friction sits on the free plan to the six pricing changes tracked this year, including an A/B test on the annual Pro price. At Canva's traffic, rapid pricing experimentation genuinely works, which exposes the harder question underneath it: experimentation optimises the structure you already have, and never asks whether the structure is the right one.

Then the AI layer, where SaaS pricing gets genuinely hard. Canva replaced a vague ladder of limited, high and higher AI access with AI allowances: three tiers of AI usage, a 40x AI Pass add-on, and no credit balance anywhere. It is more confusing than a credit model, and that looks deliberate. Credits imply you can always buy more, and they put a meter in front of a designer who is halfway through something, so the complexity moved to Canva's side of the table while a cost grid behind the label does the job credits would have done. Underneath sits an asymmetry with no clean answer: across the AI products we work on, roughly 1 percent of users consume the bulk of the AI cost, while in design tools a large share never touch the features at all. Add Claude Design turning out a report draft that beat a professional design team, and Canva ends up retroactively wrapping an LLM whose costs it also has to reprice around. Whether it can hold a simple allowance model while its own costs track someone else's infrastructure is the question.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

You spend a tremendous amount of time convincing a robot that you are not a robot. That is Okta from the outside. From the inside it is one of the better pricing stories in enterprise software right now. Okta sold identity the way a restaurant sells a menu, single sign on for a couple of dollars per user per month, then multi factor authentication, universal directory, workflows, device trust and about twenty other things. Each one felt cheap, and together they carried the company past 18.000 customers at just under 150.000 dollars a year each. In Q2 of 2025 they stopped and made curated bundles the default instead, and Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt take the live pricing page apart to work out why.

The answer is not that a la carte failed. It worked so well the product portfolio outgrew the sales motion that built it. What follows is the more for more repackaging that lets a company reprice its entire installed base in one move, and then the part nobody has solved yet, because Okta's newer products are priced per device, per API call and per machine to machine token, and the whole model assumes a user is a person. Agents are about to make that false. Ulrik ends up split, calling the human identity half of the business a clear buy and the machine identity half a sell, not because the technology is weak but because Okta will not say what any of it costs.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

Salesforce pulls in $35B in revenue but spends roughly $4.50 to acquire every $1 of growth - a byproduct of decades of "commercial debt" built into its seat-based pricing and sprawling product suite. Ulrik and Rob break down how Agentforce is testing consumption-based, credit-based, and outcome-based pricing all at once, why the "digital labor" pricing anchor is such a smart move, and why they land on a sell rating for Salesforce's pricing strategy. A must-listen for anyone thinking about SaaS pricing in the agentic AI era.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

We're on a summer break until August 19!

Catch us on PricingSaaS.com or the Willingness To Pay YouTube channel for content if you can't wait for more pricing insights before we're back.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

A quick note - this episode was recorded before Intercom's name change in May 2026 and their acquisition by Salesforce in June 2026.

Intercom was growing at 4% year-over-year while the median SaaS company was at 19%. Instead of optimising their way out of it, they scrapped their seat-based model entirely and rebuilt around a single metric: the resolved conversation.
Rob and Ulrik tear apart how Fin AI's $0.99-per-outcome pricing works, why it's already pushing $100M ARR on its own, and where the model starts to break - including the hidden risk of a price war and the uneven value problem between a private bank and a gaming company.

Topics covered:

 - Why outcome-based pricing works when the job-to-be-done is narrow

 - The seat-based model death spiral and how AI accelerated it

 - Fin's trojan horse GTM strategy: plug in on top of your existing helpdesk

 - Where the $0.99 flat rate leaves money on the table

Pricing Page unPacked breaks down real SaaS pricing decisions every week - the trade-offs behind the page, not just what's on it.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/

HubSpot is the company every SaaS startup wants to copy when it comes to pricing — but most miss why it actually works. 

In this episode, Rob and Ulrik unpack the full arc of HubSpot's pricing strategy: the clever two-axis model that unlocked expansion revenue, the freemium CRM launch that took on Salesforce, and the bundle mechanics that turn complexity into a math game customers enjoy playing. Then they dig into where HubSpot is heading — AI credits, agent teams, and the shift from system of record to system of action.

Pricing Page unPacked takes a real company's pricing page and breaks down the decisions behind it, the trade offs, and what it says about how the company actually wants to grow.

Hosted by Rob Litterst and Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt

For more information, catch us on https://www.willingnesstopay.com/