Pricing thinking, in public.

Every software CFO right now has two priorities that directly contradict each other. Cut software costs. Increase AI usage. Fair use is how you hold both.

As companies scale, LLM usage scales with them. Even after negotiating unit costs down, you're looking at 40–50% margin at best. The reality is 5–10% of users are driving 90% of your costs. A price increase for 100% of your base when 90% aren't the problem is a tough sell. So design a lever that only the 10% will feel.

You have two options: raise prices across all 1,000 customers, or set a fair use threshold at the 95th percentile and only trigger a conversation for the 50 above it. Option one risks churn from 950 customers who were never the problem. Option two protects your margin without touching anyone using the product normally.

I've used fair use to cut product COGS by 33% in six months. The framework: Inspect your usage distribution, Analyze the P95 threshold, Apply it as a hard or soft limit.

You've rebuilt the nurture sequence twice. You've tested new creative, swapped channels, thrown a webinar at it. Conversion rate hasn't moved. Here's the thing nobody tells demand gen leaders: pricing problems disguise themselves as marketing problems.

A confusing pricing page looks like a UX issue. A broken free-to-paid funnel looks like an onboarding issue. Soft pipeline looks like targeting. So you keep optimizing the stuff you control while the actual problem sits upstream, untouched.

The full article covers four pricing fundamentals nobody teaches marketers, and a maturity curve — Ship and Pray → Copy and Undercut → Research and Forget → Test and Learn — so you can figure out exactly where you sit and what to do next.