Everyone talked about going pure usage-based in 2025, and almost nobody did it.
LinkedIn was full of “We’re going consumption-based!” announcements. In practice, nearly everyone deployed hybrid models, combining fixed subscription elements with usage-based components.
This wasn’t a failure. It was inevitable.
The Reality: Pricing Is Half Strategy, Half Systems
I’ve come to think about pricing as half strategy and half systems. Both halves had blockers in 2025.
On the strategy side, companies loved the idea but couldn’t nail the execution details. What seemed simple – charge for what customers use – became complex the moment you tried to design for it. How do you balance predictability with consumption? Which usage vectors actually align with value? When does usage-based pricing create customer anxiety instead of fairness?
But the bigger blocker was systems. A shocking number of companies had brilliant pricing strategies on paper, then couldn’t generate bills in practice. It’s difficult enough with one customer. With 10 customers it becomes much more complicated. With 100 customers, the complexity multiplies.
The problem was pervasive, impacting multiple functions. Product, engineering, finance, and marketing – they’re all dependent on the same system but see it from different perspectives. Nobody understands the friction the other teams face. Everyone blames each other, but really, the system itself was broken.
Why Hybrid Won (And Will Keep Winning)
The hype around consumption pricing missed something fundamental about B2B: customers want predictability and control, not just consumption-based fairness. Hybrid pricing helps address this because the fixed subscription elements deliver predictability, with consumption-based components delivering value at the margin.
In addition, hybrid pricing helps prevent a common pitfall of usage-based models: the tendency to erode perceived value instead of strengthening it. Consider these two customer mindsets: “I use a lot, so I should pay a little bit more” versus “I don’t use much, so I should pay less.”
The first mindset creates a perception of value. The customer sees tight linkage between usage and outcomes. They’re happy to pay more because using more means they’re doing better.
The second mindset destroys perception of value. Often, these are customers getting massive value from having the capability available, even if they use it with low intensity. But a heavy usage-based skew to pricing encourages them to think volume should equal cost. Suddenly, you’re in a cost-plus pricing conversation instead of a value conversation, and at that point, you’ve lost.
Hybrid pricing solves this. The fixed component functions as a quasi-platform fee; even if it includes some usage allowances, the line between “access” and “usage” becomes intentionally blurred. Heavy users pay a bit more, and the rationale is clear to them. Light users don’t push to negotiate down their fee because they see it primarily as paying for access to the service. Meanwhile, the usage-based portion protects your margins without creating FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) across your customer base.
But even the best hybrid model fails if customers can’t see what they’re paying for, and that’s a data problem, not a pricing one.
The Real Problem: Billing Shock Comes from Disconnected Data
When customers get surprised by bills, most companies think it’s a billing problem or a pricing problem. It’s neither.
It’s a notification and data availability problem.
When your billing and usage data is trapped in separate systems, you can’t make that information available where it matters – in your product, in your sales CRM, in your customer success platforms. Customers can’t see their usage converting into spend. Your teams can’t proactively reach out when things go sideways. Nobody has the visibility or control to prevent the surprise.
For CFOs, this is where pricing strategy meets operational reality. If your usage and billing data can’t flow, you’ll have revenue blockages too (retention and expansion challenges linked to poor customer experiences).
The solution isn’t better invoices. It’s democratising billing data across your entire business. Make it available everywhere: dashboards in-product, alerts for customers, forecasting tools for account teams. When the data infrastructure is in place, you have the groundwork needed to prevent billing shock.
In 2026, people will increasingly see this data infrastructure as offence (an opportunity to improve customer experiences) rather than just defence (avoiding negative experiences). Billing isn’t just a necessary evil, it’s an ROI reinforcement opportunity. Proactively reaching out to your customers at the right time helps build trust. Usage and billing dashboards (like AWS’s) tell a story about usage being valuable, not scary.
2026: The Year Pricing Grows Up
Here’s my prediction: 2026 won’t be about backlash against usage-based pricing. It’ll be about increased market sophistication and more hybrid pricing.
Companies will realise that hybrid isn’t a compromise; it’s what works because it balances predictability and control with the value-enhancing aspects of usage-based pricing.
There will also be less fear of hybrid seeming complicated. Growing market sophistication will lead people to distinguish between “complex” and “complicated”. Complex means pricing is difficult to understand, lacks transparency and is unpredictable – that’s bad. But complicated just means it is intricate and requires some thought, which is fine in a B2B context providing it’s conceptually easy to grasp. Hybrid pricing is complicated, not complex.
In 2026, billing transparency won’t give you the real edge; it’s table stakes. Once companies get their data infrastructure in shape, the real moat becomes pricing agility; the ability to iterate fast on both strategy and systems. You won’t get pricing right the first time, or the fifth time, or the tenth time. AI features and evolving business models mean constant experimentation. The winners will be companies whose systems can accommodate rapid iteration.
And for CFOs, that sophistication starts with command of the systems that make pricing agility possible.
Why CFOs Talk Modern Billing but Don’t Pull the Trigger
In previous years, every CFO I talked to said they wanted to modernise billing infrastructure. Few were actually doing it.
I understood why. These transformations looked like potential career-enders. They were expensive, disruptive, and touched critical revenue infrastructure. Success wasn’t guaranteed. So, CFOs kept making excuses to kick the project down the road.
Now though, the biggest risk isn’t getting modernisation wrong. It’s inaction.
There’s a less scary path now. Next-generation billing infrastructure can sit largely behind the scenes, making your existing CRM and ERP work as they need to without wholesale replacement. The early adopters are proving it works. Success stories are plentiful.
The market is still early with respect to modernising monetisation systems; think cloud migration a generation ago, when it was still in the early adopter phase. But patterns are emerging. By the end of 2026, it will be becoming clearer that companies with pricing agility are pulling away from everyone else. For CFOs, the question isn’t whether to modernise. It’s how long you can afford to wait.
