Thank You for Vibe Pricing

Chargebee

Thank You for Vibe Pricing is a new monthly podcast series from Chargebee about the one thing we can’t stop thinking about: AI monetization. It’s a nod to the early — part-chaotic, part-inspired — phase of pricing and packaging AI products that’s defined the last couple of years. This is where we document what it takes to scale beyond that — to move past pricing on vibes and into durable growth, from teams that have done it astonishingly ahead of the curve. We explore the systems, principles, and trade-offs shaping how AI products are priced, packaged, and sustained. It’s all in here: the day-to-day work of scaling emerging pricing models. The rigorous, cross-functional ice climb of refiguring value, customer expectations, and cost-to-serve. And the riveting, still-unwritten futures of how we price and thus, build. Listen in. Hosts: Vinay Seshadri and Ariela Bitran | Design: Apoorva Sidhu and Prasanth Rajasekar | Editorial: Akash Sharma

Episodes

  1. Jul 17

    Miro’s former head of monetization on credits, scaling pricing experiments, and more | Akshay Sharma

    In this episode of Thank You for Vibe Pricing, Chargebee's series on teams scaling AI monetization, we're joined by Akshay Sharma, co-founder at Morph Systems and a former pricing leader at Miro, Splunk, and McKinsey. Akshay shares instructive notes on: How every pricing choice informs user behaviour (featuring a story on why Miro originally instituted a five-seat minimum on a paid plan and removed it post product-market fit), a framework for assessing why pricing based on usage is the right answer for most companies today, how differently Splunk and Miro each navigated the shift towards pricing based on consumption, the necessary frictions of the emerging credits model, a systems view on running effective pricing experiments, a case for low-margin business models, why he sees an AI monetization future where “you would literally be changing your price per second, as if you’re selling a commodity,” and much more. Chapters: 00:00 - Episode intro 02:24 - Akshay's journey in tech 05:20 - Pricing as a product feature 09:03 - The (newish) value of software 14:45 - Monetization meets org charts 18:39 - Usage-based pricing's big unlock 23:38 - Transitioning to consumption models 27:58 - Credits and user momentum 31:12 - Low-margin software 36:01 - A system for pricing experiments 42:48 - Seats, hybrids, and pricing agents 45:03 - On pricing frameworks — Referenced: Miro How to Leverage Pricing and Packaging to Drive Growth, Revenue, and Profit Should Open AI switch to Credits for it's subscription? Splunk Salesforce Clari LinkedIn Cursor Replit Lovable — Connect with Akshay: LinkedIn — Connect with Vinay: LinkedIn — Connect with Ariela: LinkedIn — About Chargebee: Chargebee builds foundational billing and monetization infrastructure for the dynamic, fast-scaling AI-era business models — from seats and usage, to agents, outcomes, and hybrid pricing structures. Built for product, finance, and GTM teams that treat pricing as a growth lever.

    Miro’s former head of monetization on credits, scaling pricing experiments, and more | Akshay Sharma
  2. Mar 17

    PostHog AI's PM on pricing like infra, designing AI free tiers, and more | Annika Schmid

    In this episode of Thank You for Vibe Pricing, Chargebee's series on teams scaling AI monetization, we're joined by Annika Schmid, PM for PostHog AI. Annika shares instructive notes on: PostHog's cost-proximate, yet unconditionally value-first pricing philosophy, why PostHog treats pricing first and foremost as a product feature rather than a revenue lever, how they designed PostHog AI's free tier by working backwards from persona and beta usage data, how they navigated the question of whether AI should be priced as a horizontal platform layer or rolled into individual product pricing, how the billing team and product PMs divide ownership on monetization bets, and Annika's predictions on the two paths that AI monetization models can take — both centred on consumption — in the near future. — Chapters: 00:00 - Episode highlights 02:16 - What's PostHog? 03:11 - Annika's role at PostHog AI 04:41 - (Principally) pricing closer to cost 06:37 - "Default alive" monetization 08:58 - A methodical view of costs 11:39 - Designing PostHog AI's free tier 14:38 - Factoring in LLM volatility 18:51 - Charging for consumption 21:54 - Pricing as a product 23:05 - Usage and spend reporting 25:53 - Monetizing a multi-product AI layer 32:18 - Where pricing hypotheses originate 35:14 - MoM growth metrics that matter 37:07 - Pricing PMs and the billing team 39:47 - What's more exciting than pricing AI 42:17 - The habit of changing prices often 44:37 - Two (near-future) pricing predictions 47:02 - AI pricing as an existential question — Referenced: PostHog AWS Cloudflare PostHog's pricing principles 8 learnings from 1 year of agents – PostHog AI Non-obvious pricing advice for startups Glue teams vs back-office teams AMA w/ James & Tim (founders of posthog) — Connect with Annika: LinkedIn — Connect with Vinay: LinkedIn: — Connect with Ariela: LinkedIn — About Chargebee: Chargebee builds foundational billing and monetization infrastructure for the dynamic, fast-scaling AI-era business models — from seats and usage, to agents, outcomes, and hybrid structures. Built for product, finance, and GTM teams that treat pricing as a growth lever.

    PostHog AI's PM on pricing like infra, designing AI free tiers, and more | Annika Schmid
  3. 12/11/2025

    Clay’s monetization lead on scaling a credit-based model, sustainable growth, and more | Zona Zhang

    In this episode of Thank You for Vibe Pricing, Chargebee’s new series on scaling AI monetization, we're joined by Zona Zhang, who leads monetization at Clay. Zona walks us through Clay's deeply value-led credit-based pricing model (among the 6 consequential GTM bets that helped them grow from $1m-$100m ARR in 2 years)—why monetization sits at the intersection of finance and product, how they’ve designed credits as a currency for unlocking modules of usage and exceptional, full-funnel growth, why and how they iterated on differentiating Clay’s enterprise pricing from the very early days, how they introduced credit rollovers after observing high "restart rates" from episodic users, why engineers at Clay review AI P&Ls as a core part of the product development process, and Zona's thesis on how AI monetization will evolve in the coming years, and much more. — Chapters: 00:00 - Episode highlights 00:57 - Episode intro 03:37 - Zona’s career path 04:47 - Why pricing sits under finance at Clay 06:37 - AI credits as “currency” 07:20 - Reverse trials and fixing the education gap 08:57 - Pricing “modules of usage” 10:40 - What sets Clay’s PLG motion apart 13:48 - The thesis behind credit rollovers 15:45 - Strategies for solving usage friction 18:58 - Formulating Clay’s enterprise pricing 24:05 - Scaling pricing across GTM motions 25:30 - Two things that matter for discounting 27:42 - Unit economics and engineers 31:24 - The billion-dollar AI pricing question 34:36 - “We look at dashboards a lot” — Referenced: Introducing Clay Pricing 3.0 Varun Anand (Co-founder, Clay) Kareem Amin (Co-founder, Clay) The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation Asana Custom Signals (a Clay feature) Snowflake Databricks OpenAI Everett Berry (Head of GTM engineering, Clay) — Connect with Zona: LinkedIn — Connect with Vinay: LinkedIn — Connect with Ariela: LinkedIn — About Chargebee: Chargebee builds foundational billing and monetization infrastructure for the dynamic, fast-scaling AI-era business models — from seats and usage, to agents, outcomes, and hybrid structures. Built for product, finance, and GTM teams that treat pricing as a growth lever.

    Clay’s monetization lead on scaling a credit-based model, sustainable growth, and more | Zona Zhang
  4. 11/25/2025

    Intercom's pricing lead on Fin's radical AI monetization model, PMs as GMs, more | Aisling O'Reilly

    In this inaugural episode of Thank You for Vibe Pricing, Chargebee’s new series on scaling AI monetization, we are joined by Aisling O’Reilly, Head of Pricing at Intercom. Aisling talks about: Intercom’s complete pricing overhaul and why they risked multi-millions in ARR in the short run to chalk out a path of durable, customer-first growth, how they designed Fin’s pioneering outcome-based model (and chose it over a usage-based variant), the operational readiness that allowed them to price for AI resolutions, how and why Intercom PMs are evolving into more commercial GMs, how the future of outcome-based pricing will likely capture even more nuanced forms of value, and so much more. — Chapters: (00:00) Episode highlights (01:41) Episode intro (03:53) A “sink-or-swim” pricing moment  (06:55) Origins of Fin’s pioneering model (09:56) A CTO-led transformation (13:16) Being ready for pricing outcomes (15:55) Is a dollar too expensive? (18:48) Inventive predictability unlocks (22:57) A bet on falling infra costs (26:15) “It took that one PM” (30:27) No perfect pricing model (32:51) Outcomes beyond outcomes  (37:25) The intersection of product and pricing (41:34) Strong-minded finance teams (45:09) The problem with (cost-plus) AI credits — Referenced: Fin AI LinkedIn Darragh Curran: Eoghan McCabe: Pricing AI agents: What does ‘value-based pricing’ really mean for AI? — Connect with Aisling: LinkedIn — Connect with Vinay: LinkedIn — Connect with Ariela: LinkedIn — About Chargebee: Chargebee builds foundational billing infrastructure for the dynamic, fast-scaling AI-era business models — from seats and usage, to agents, outcomes, and hybrid structures. Built for product, finance, and GTM teams that treat monetization as a growth lever.

    Intercom's pricing lead on Fin's radical AI monetization model, PMs as GMs, more | Aisling O'Reilly

About

Thank You for Vibe Pricing is a new monthly podcast series from Chargebee about the one thing we can’t stop thinking about: AI monetization. It’s a nod to the early — part-chaotic, part-inspired — phase of pricing and packaging AI products that’s defined the last couple of years. This is where we document what it takes to scale beyond that — to move past pricing on vibes and into durable growth, from teams that have done it astonishingly ahead of the curve. We explore the systems, principles, and trade-offs shaping how AI products are priced, packaged, and sustained. It’s all in here: the day-to-day work of scaling emerging pricing models. The rigorous, cross-functional ice climb of refiguring value, customer expectations, and cost-to-serve. And the riveting, still-unwritten futures of how we price and thus, build. Listen in. Hosts: Vinay Seshadri and Ariela Bitran | Design: Apoorva Sidhu and Prasanth Rajasekar | Editorial: Akash Sharma