SaaS Says: Who Owns the Meter

Who Owns the Meter

Ali Hussain opened his company's AI bill expecting to find engineers. "I looked at my latest anthropic bill, and I thought it was going to be very engineering heavy. But I've got power users ripping through tokens and sales, finance itself"

Hussain co-founded Tabs, which sells billing software, and Tabs sponsors the series he appeared on. The bill is still the point. Most companies now pay several model vendors at once, the spend shows up in every department, and "we've passed the threshold of materiality." So the line moves. "My hot take is I do think this ultimately lands more finance and accounting than CTO and IT." Then the harder half: "You have to figure out what is the way to pass on the cogs where you can hit a gross margin profile that is sustainable"

Emily Man, an investor at Primary Ventures, which backs Tabs, has the order of magnitude. A growth-stage CEO told her the company's AI spend went from $200,000 last year to a run rate in the millions. She can see compute becoming a P&L line as large as G&A. The savings people expected from building in house are also coming due. "some of these vibe coded systems that they had stood up overnight are great, but we're going to require a lot more work to maintain."

The revenue side is going variable too. Sam Chung, Salesforce's chief customer officer and a former CFO inside the company, on what replaces the seat: "But in the world of AI, who is the user? There is no user. It's an agent." Consumption fills the gap, and it breaks the thing SaaS was built on. "Well, consumption is not predictable at all. It really depends on what a customer decides to use." The cost lands in collections. "They're going to have a lot of questions on their invoices. They're going to have a lot of disputes on what you're charging them." Chung sells revenue software, so read the diagnosis partly as a pitch.

Francois Lopitaux, who runs product at ThoughtSpot, calls the next stretch a cost phase: the value is proven, now get the cost under it, and be able to switch models quickly. He also draws the line on where the meter cannot run. "when you ask like, what is my revenue this year, you don't want them to be creative, right?"

Robinhood's CFO is the holdout. Shiv Verma: "I will put even stronger. I hate variable cost." At Robinhood, "85 to 90% of our costs are fixed." His case is the old software model at full strength. "It's really, really easy for someone to come in and build it quickly with variable cost and high operational cost. It's really hard to do at the high fixed cost base."

Last week the margin broke. This week finance asked for the meter.

Sources: Interviews from Run the Numbers (Oct 6, Ali Hussain of Tabs; Oct 5, Emily Man of Primary Ventures; and Oct 8, Shiv Verma of Robinhood), CFO Thought Leader (Oct 7, Sam Chung of Salesforce), and The Product Experience (Oct 6, Francois Lopitaux of ThoughtSpot).