The SaaS competitor's agent is coming
It's do or die
We’ve been hearing from around the world - SaaS boards want an "AI strategy". Now you’re adding chatbots, adding “AI” to landing pages, and pitching "AI-powered insights."
Meanwhile, three university dropouts in a trenchcoat are building an agent that replaces your entire product. And they'll be charging $9 for what you charge $900.
Six months from now, your enterprise customers will ask why they need 47 DocuSign seats when an agent can handle every contract. Why they need ZoomInfo's $30k package when an agent can enrich leads for pennies. Why they need RingCentral at all when an AI handles every call.
You'll have a great answer about security, compliance, and enterprise features.
They won't care.
The math that will kill your SaaS
Let's use DocuSign as an example.
It’s a great product with $2.7 billion in revenue. Average enterprise contract estimated at $48,000/year, or so I’m told.
Here's what a document signing agent costs to run:
PDF parsing: $0.20
Signature verification: $0.001
Workflow orchestration: $0.003
Audit trail generation: $0.001
Total cost per document: $0.007
A startup can charge $99/month for unlimited signatures and still have 94% margins.
Your customers aren't stupid. They can do this math too. Even if they pay for other things than just the PDF signing aspect.
Chart 1: The 90% Price Collapse Is Already Here
Your moat could sink you
"But we have enterprise features! Compliance! Integrations!"
Sure, cool story.
Let’s look at some examples:
ZoomInfo's moat: 300 million contact profiles, painstakingly verified.
Agent replacement: Real-time LinkedIn scraping + email verification. Cost: $0.03 per contact.
Calendly's moat: Beautiful scheduling UI, calendar integrations.
Agent replacement: "Find me time with John next week." Done. No UI needed.
Zendesk’s moat: Decade of conversation data, sophisticated routing.
Agent replacement: Agent that actually solves problems instead of routing to humans.
This moat could end up protecting you but also drowning you.
The AI-native competitor doesn't need to rebuild your features. They need to solve your customer's problem. Those aren't the same thing.
AI enhancement is a lie
Every SaaS company has the same playbook right now:
Add ChatGPT to existing workflows
Call it "AI-powered"
Increase prices 20%
Hope nobody notices it's lipstick on a pig
This isn't transformation. It's decoration.
If your AI innovation is suggested email templates, while a 5-person startup built an agent that completely replaces sales outreach, …
You get the picture.
The cannibalization dilemma
Here's your actual choice:
Option A: Protect your existing revenue model
Keep charging per seat
Add incremental AI features
Maintain 70% margins
Die slowly as customers churn to agents
Option B: Blow up your own business model
Build agents that replace your product
Charge 90% less
Destroy your own margins
Maybe survive the transition
There is no Option C. This is do or die.
The brutal truth? If you're not willing to make your own product obsolete, someone else will do it for you. And they're already building.
What Salesforce understands that you may not
Marc Benioff launched Agentforce. Not "Salesforce with AI", not "AI-powered CRM"… Agents. That replace human work. That threaten their own seat-based model.
They're charging $2 per conversation instead of $125 per user per month.
Salesforce told the market: "Our own pricing model is obsolete"
They're cannibalizing a $30 billion revenue stream. Because they know if they don't, someone else will.
How we see the market in 3 types
I see the market split across three types:
Type 1: The Deniers (45% of market)
"AI is just hype. Our enterprise customers value stability."
Timeline to irrelevance: 18 months
Type 2: The Decorators (40% of market)
"Look, we added AI! There's a chatbot now!"
Timeline to irrelevance: 24 months
Type 3: The Destroyers (15% of market)
"We're building agents that make our current product worthless."
Timeline to relevance: Indefinite
Where are you on this path?
If you're an incumbent SaaS - here's your escape route
Before you panic and fire your entire product team, I have some math for you.
Your board may keep asking about protecting seat revenue and ARR, but they're asking the wrong question.
Seats in your customer's org: These are going down. Every quarter. Forever.
Tasks they need completed: Going up. Exponentially. No ceiling.
A 50-person company used to have 40 potential Salesforce seats. Maximum.
That same company now has 50,000 potential customer interactions that need handling. 10,000 documents to process. 100,000 data points to analyze.
The constraint has flipped. You're no longer limited by headcount. You're limited by imagination.
What would work for you:
Step 1: Stop Counting Seats, Start Counting Outcomes
Salesforce didn't launch "Agentforce" as a feature, but as a shift from "per user per month" to "per conversation." That's not a pricing change!
Your version:
DocuSign: Stop charging per user. Charge per contract value processed.
ZoomInfo: Stop charging per seat. Charge per qualified opportunity generated.
Intercom: Stop charging per agent. Charge per issue resolved.
The beautiful part? A 50-person company might have had 3 support agents. But they have 3,000 support tickets. You just 1000x'd your addressable market.
Think in outcomes!
Step 2: Become the orchestration layer and embed in their workflows
You can't compete with agents on cost. But you have something they don't: Trust, compliance, and a decade of edge cases.
Orchestrate the agents or AI…
For example:
Let startups build specialized agents
You become the governance layer
Charge for orchestration, compliance, and quality assurance
Take a cut of every agent transaction through your platform
Think in terms of the App Store, not apps. Think Shopify, not shops….
Step 3: Price for Abundance, Not Scarcity
The old model assumed scarcity:
Limited seats = premium pricing
More users = more revenue
Growth tied to customer headcount
The new model assumes abundance:
Unlimited tasks = volume pricing
More automation = more revenue
Growth tied to customer success
Here's what this looks like:
Agents aren’t your replacement - they’re your multiplication factor
Every agent that replaces a human creates 10x more work that needs governing, monitoring, and orchestrating. Every automated workflow creates 10x more data that needs analyzing. Every AI interaction creates 10x more complexity that needs managing.
The companies that win won't be the ones that fight agents. They'll be the ones that help customers deploy 1,000 agents safely.
Get it together
Accept reality now
Run the unit economics on outcome-based pricing
Identify your top 10 customers' task volumes
Model revenue at $0.10-1.00 per outcome
Pick your battlefield
Choose: Build agents, orchestrate agents, or govern agents
Launch a pilot with your most innovative customer
Price it at 10x current per-seat equivalent
Burn the boats
Announce the new model publicly
Give customers 12 months to transition
Show Wall Street the multiplication math
The Choice Is Still Binary
But it's not the choice you think.
You don’t get to keep seats. You need to embrace abundance, and not defend scarcity.
Seats are finite. Tasks are infinite.
You can be Blockbuster, clutching your late fees while Netflix ships DVDs.
Or you can be Netflix, burning your DVD business to build streaming.
There's no middle ground. No hedging. No "wait and see."
Build the agent that kills your product. Or watch someone else do it.
Choose wisely.
What's your move?
We see the invoices. The 90% price collapse isn't a prediction, it's happening now. SaaS companies using Paid are tracking agent costs vs. traditional licensing in real-time. The spread is wider than you think. And growing. Talk to us at Paid to learn more about monetizing AI and agents