FIELD NOTE 02 / HOW VALUE GETS CAPTURED
The license survives. It no longer carries the whole business.
Seats once approximated value. Software that performs work breaks that approximation.DIRECT ANSWER
The short version
Hybrid pricing combines a recurring platform fee with charges tied more closely to activity or value. An insurer might pay for the governed system, then for transactions, documents processed, reserved engineering capacity, or agreed outcomes. Seats can remain. They simply stop pretending to represent all of the work the product now performs.What changes
Revenue becomes a stack rather than a single license: platform access, usage, transactions, implementation or engineering capacity, managed operations, and sometimes outcomes. Vendors need a measurable unit of work. Buyers need to understand how cost changes with adoption.
What does not
Predictability still matters. Procurement still wants a budget. Vendors still need committed revenue and enough capacity to serve customers well. Post-SaaS does not require pure outcome pricing—or a meter attached to every click.
An insurance example
An MGA pays a base fee for policy administration, permissions, auditability, and integrations. It then pays by active policy or bound transaction, plus reserved capacity when launching a new product. The shared system remains licensed; more of the price now follows the work.
The Season 2 question
Season 2 asks what replaces seat expansion, how buyers preserve cost certainty, and which units remain credible after the sales deck meets the contract.