SaaStr 880: Agent Pricing is Chaos. Here's What We're Seeing From the Buyer Side. (The Agents #015)

Jason Lemkin (0:02)

Hey, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, The Agents, Life with Us, Three Humans, One Dog and 21 Plus Agents.

This week, we went through 22,000 of the executives, Director and Up, who attended our SaaStr AI annual events the last few years. Amelia will share the analysis. AI native titles are up four times, and half of everyone has changed jobs in the last 16 months. Pretty crazy. At the same time, almost every legacy vendor we use is raising prices on our agents once again.

Amelia (0:35)

Yeah, and one of those agents deleted a core part of our SaaStr Connect, not once, but twice.

Then told Jason, it wasn't responsible. So today, who actually owns AI now, what agent pricing looks like from the buyer side, and why both OpenAI and Anathropic are paying upwards of $400,000 for someone to run events.

Jason Lemkin (0:55)

Okay, I'm Jason, here with Amelia. Three humans, 21, 22 plus agents. We'll kick it off with Amelia. Actually, I didn't think this would be very interesting, but it was.

Amelia will talk through it, but Amelia basically works with 10K for hours every day, our AI VP of Revenue, which as you guys know, if you follow this, this pod or just us in general started off as a pretty simple dashboard. Now really runs almost all of SaaStr more of outbound, more of inbound, more of everything. She asked 10K to do a deep analysis, just who comes to our IRL events, SaaStr AI annual the last few years, and just what's changed for us as a B2B community was pretty interesting. What did you and 10K learn, Amelia?

Amelia (1:46)

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Hey, everyone. If you're listening to the agents, then you need to be at SaaStr AI Annual. We'll be back next May in 2027, the world's largest B2B and AI event, May 11th and 12th in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like most conferences and content these days are about what's possible. As you know from the agents, we're all about what's happening now. The latest and greatest, and that's what we do even more so at SaaStr Annual. See the actual work where we bring together 10,000 founders, revenue leaders and VCs plus 200 of the very best speakers showing you the playbooks of what's already running in production, behind the scenes, deep dive demos and so much more. Plus over 5,000 scheduled one-on-one meetings so you can actually meet the people doing all of this, not just hear from them. If you're a founder or revenue leader, or you're the one who has to make this all work with agents, this is where you want to be. You already know this from listening to the agents. That's SaaS for AI Annual 2027 Go to SaaS for annual.com and use our code the agents for a special discount on your tickets. See you there. Yeah, so it's interesting. We started this exercise of we realized when I was doing some outbound to our paytick holders of the last two years, just some recent folks, we ran it through an enrichment. I talked a little bit about our process last week, but just as a refresher, we use a combination of ZoomInfo, SumBull, and Clay, just to see if you're going to go to outbound. I assumed the turnover rate in our folks and our buyers was high.

Once we started to enrich the data, I realized we had a pretty good subset of folks that are in B2B, in AI, coming to events, spending money, and so after we enrich the whole thing, I started asking 10K to do an analysis to see what patterns would emerge. I think there's a few high-level ones, but there's some I wanted to share with you guys and then get Jason's take on because I feel like it's important to talk about since we have this data that maybe nobody else has since we have these 22,000 plus pay ticket holders over the last two years or so.

And so the first one, maybe this has to do with how we program SaaStr, maybe this has to do with how just everything has changed so much over the last two years in particular. So we looked at the data from 2025 SaaStr annuals. So for reference that would have been in May of 2025, people would have been purchasing tickets leading up to the event in 2024 going into 2025 And then we also analyzed all the 2026 paid ticket holder data. So that's everybody 10,000 plus that came this year. So that's 2025 into 2026, May of 2026 And then we looked a little bit at the early data from folks who have already bought for SaaStr 2027 who are buying now. And so that's how we put together this composite of 22,000 plus people and specifically paid people only. So we took out all the free folks, the sponsors, speakers, stuff like that. So these are just paid folks only who are buyers who are throwing down in B2B and AI.