W
Welcome to TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly newsletter of startups and markets. It is inspired by the TechCrunch+ daily column from which it gets its name. Do you want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.
“This is not usage-based or subscription pricing,” venture capital firm OpenView wrote in its second state of usage-based pricing report. These hybrid approaches require new tools, but which ones? We are going to explore. — Ana
Complex prices on the rise
As we learned earlier this week from the latest OpenView report, usage-based pricing is rising, but it’s not a replacement for other models.
Sure, most SaaS companies bill their customers based on how they use the service. But this often comes in combination with other pricing approaches, like tiered subscriptions.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the latest example of this hybrid pricing approach. In addition to its free tier, it introduced ChatGPT Plus, a fairly simple subscription model that starts at $20 per month. But the company also saying was to “actively explore options for lower cost plans, business plans, and data packages.”
Data bundles: That would be a form of usage-based pricing, but it wouldn’t replace subscriptions. Which means that ChatGPT would join the growing range of products with complex pricing.
