Inevitable AI Group
$285 billion. Gone. In roughly 48 hours in February.
That's how much SaaS companies lost when the market finally did the math. Not because AI is a fad. Because per-seat pricing is a relic of a world where every task required a human to log in.
That world is over.
The Model Was Always a Proxy
Per-seat pricing was never really about seats. It was a proxy for value. More users meant more usage meant more value. It worked because the unit of work was the human.
Now the unit of work is the agent.
An AI agent doesn't need a license. It doesn't log in. It doesn't have a named user account. It pulls data, executes tasks, and closes the tab — and the SaaS vendor has nothing to charge for. The entire pricing architecture collapses.
Klarna figured this out early. They ditched Salesforce's flagship CRM and built their own AI system. One company. One moment. The market saw it and started asking: what if everyone does this?
Turns out, everyone is.
The "Build vs. Buy" Decision Just Changed
For twenty years, "build vs. buy" always defaulted to buy. SaaS was cheaper, faster, and safer than building your own. The incumbents won that argument every time.
AI coding agents just ended that argument.
The barrier to building software is now lower than it has ever been in history. A team of two can ship something in days that used to require a team of twenty and six months. For the first time, "build" is genuinely competitive with "buy" — not just for giants like Klarna, but for any company with decent engineering.
Salesforce knows this. Zendesk knows this. Every per-seat vendor knows this. That's why the stocks are falling. Not because their products got worse. Because the moat dried up.
This Is What We Saw Coming
When we started Inevitable AI Group, the thesis wasn't "SaaS is dying." It was simpler than that.
Every proven SaaS market has an AI-native version waiting to be built. Not a cheaper clone. Not a feature-stuffed alternative. The version that should have been built if the market were starting today — leaner, AI-first, priced for what it actually delivers.
Per-seat pricing is the wrong model for an agentic world. We never used it.
Corebee is workflow automation — not $55/agent/month, but a fraction of that, built from scratch for AI-native teams. mahakala.app is AI scheduling for $1/month — not because we're racing to the bottom on price, but because the bloat that justified $10/month was never the product. Spiceform builds forms in seconds with AI. Free. No per-seat nonsense.
The incumbents are going to bolt AI features onto their existing architectures and call it transformation. Some will survive. Most won't.
What Comes Next Isn't SaaS
The successor to per-seat SaaS isn't freemium. It isn't usage-based. It isn't some hybrid model consultants are going to spend 2027 writing whitepapers about.
It's outcome-based. Value-based. "Did this thing do the job?" pricing.
We're not there yet. The industry is still figuring out how to measure outcomes. But the direction is clear, and the companies that will own the next decade are the ones that started building for that world now — not the ones defending seats they're about to lose.
The SaaSpocalypse everyone's panicking about? It's not the end of software. It's the end of software that was built for the wrong era.
We're building for the right one.
— Nimrod Lehavi, Inevitable AI Group