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Most AI companies walk into renewals with usage numbers. Customers want to know what the usage did. We interviewed 29 people on both sides of AI renewals, 17 buyers and 12 vendors, about what earns the renewal and what loses it. 6 of the 12 vendors had turned up to a renewal out of sync with the customer. Here is what both sides agreed on, where they split, and what to change before your next one.

"Someone's going to go all-in on outcome-based pricing and force everyone else to follow. It just hasn't happened yet." maximus greenwald built Warmly, to $7M ARR across 6 pivots, and he's still navigating the pricing question every AI company is avoiding. On the latest Get Paid with Manny Medina episode, Manny Medina & Maximus break down why credits vs. seats is still an open fight, why enterprise keeps pulling companies back to predictable spend, and what it'll take for one brave startup to flip the whole industry. 🎧 Episode links in the comments

New episode of Get Paid with Manny Medina is live. Manny Medina sat down with Jason Eubanks, founder of Aurasell AI, and the conversation went places we have not heard in go-to-market tech before. Here's the stat that started it all. Jason was CRO at Harness. He opened a Google sheet at 3am in a Palo Alto hotel room and listed every product in his go-to-market stack. 22 products. $3 million a year in SaaS fees. And a sales team spending just 28% of their day actually in front of customers. The rest was context switching. Copying and pasting. Manually driving workflows across 10 to 12 tools a day. So he raised $30M and built Aurasell to tear it all down. An AI-native platform that replaces the CRM plus the 15 other tools you normally bolt onto it to make it usable. But the moment that stopped us in the conversation was the deal he closed. A large enterprise customer came to the table mid-negotiation and said: we want to pay for outcomes, not seats. Not a connected call over 45 seconds. Not a completed workflow. Actual revenue growth. They onboarded thousands of sellers in three months. That is what happens when your pricing model creates a forcing function for full platform adoption. The customer pulls instead of being pushed. Manny has been saying for over a year that outcomes are the only way go-to-market software should get paid. This is the first time we have seen it happen in the wild. Full episode below. 🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/e24x7Uda 🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eQFmGfCC ▶️ YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ekxuw_dz

There's a trap hiding inside every AI company right now. The better your product gets, the more your customers can argue to pay you less. I know, because I built it into Outreach without realising. We were more innovative than ever. best product in the market. And customers were coming back to renegotiate down. Not because we'd failed them. Because we'd made them so efficient, they needed fewer seats to get the same results. We'd built our own ceiling. The fastest-growing AI companies today like Cursor, Lovable, Clay, etc. don't have this problem. Every time their product does more, their customers spend more. That's not an accident. That's a monetization decision. Most founders don't figure this out until it's too expensive. We’re launching our credits based monetization solution to solve exactly that! More to come soon!

Everybody talks about storytelling. Nobody actually teaches it. It gets handed to marketing. Turned into a case study. Problem. Solution. ROI. Yay. That is not a story! Doug Landis has been building the case for storytelling as a core sales skill since his days as Chief Storyteller at Box. Now he's betting his company StoryPath.ai on it. His argument: 90% of a deal is done when you're not in the room. If all you've armed your buyer with is features and a price, you've lost before the internal conversation starts. Stories don't just communicate. They transfer belief. And belief is what gets someone to sell your product upstairs, across their org, to their CFO who's never heard of you. The new episode of Get Paid with Manny Medina is live. Manny Medina and Doug go deep on why storytelling is the last real moat in a world of commoditised AI outputs, how to build that skill across a sales team, and what pricing has to do with the story you tell. One of the most practical conversations we've recorded. 🎧 Apple: https://lnkd.in/eYB-Hayz 🎧 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e978SyVb ▶️ YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eaFTYQU3 #GetPaidPodcast #Storytelling #GTM #SaaSFounders #AIStrategy

The realisation that our most engaged users were actually losing us money was a tough one. We built Artifact AI for power users. The ones who get real value from the product, use it every day, push every feature. In theory, those are your best customers. In practice, they were quietly destroying our margins. We had a pricing model that made sense when we launched it. Simple, legible, easy to sell. But as usage scaled, the economics broke down. Our highest-engagement accounts were running at a loss. We just couldn't see it clearly enough to act. That's the part that stung. It wasn't that we didn't have the data. It's that we didn't have visibility into what it meant at the account level, where the leakage was, which usage patterns were costing us, and what a sustainable model actually looked like. We worked with Manny Medina and Paid to fix this. They ingested our real-time usage and cost data at the account level and showed us precisely where our margin was eroding. For the first time, we could see our agentic costs and our margins, in real time, by customer, product, segment, everything! From there, we used Paid to rebuild our pricing from the ground up. A credit-based model where credits map to actual task value and cost. Bundles shaped around real usage patterns. An overage structure that protects us without penalising customers. The result: - Increased margins across our entire customer base. - A clear, repeatable path to expansion for our sales and CS teams. - Full visibility into our agentic cost structure. Something we'd never had before. Ultimately, being able to charge for the value we deliver is what Paid enables us to do now. If your most engaged users are your least profitable, that's not just a finance problem. It's a signal that your pricing isn't connected to your costs. And until you can see both in real time, you can't fix it. Pricing is product. And now ours actually works.