ZoomInfo's CEO says three models now challenge seats

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck says seats carried B2B software pricing for four years, and three replacement models have emerged to challenge it, per SaaStr's write-up of his remarks.

Any company still billing per user has to defend that choice without a clear industry consensus to point to. Schuck's own headline is that nobody knows which model wins, and by his account the answer changes week to week.

He offers a test in place of picking a winner: can you name a single countable thing your software does that a customer would pay for on its own? If the answer is no, the three new models are just seats wearing a different label.

Schuck also pushes back on the assumption that AI alone is killing per-seat pricing. He argues the pressure predates the current run of AI pricing experiments, a correction to the story most vendors have been telling themselves.

Most seat pricing survives because nobody can name one metered action to charge for instead. Whether the three new models hold up depends on whether they answer that question, or just relabel a seat as something else.