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Tech founders used to tell me their pricing was inspired by Salesforce or Slack. Now they tell me Intercom, HubSpot, OpenAI, and Clay (and, yes, some still say Salesforce).

Aside from Intercom, all have some form of credit-based pricing.

These iconic companies are far from alone. Credit-based pricing surged by 126% in 2025. Figma just joined the club, and their new AI monetization strategy sent the stock price surging (after previously falling by 80%). PostHog added AI credit pricing, too.

When these influencers change their pricing, I pay attention. And Clay did just that, announcing a big pricing overhaul just this morning.

Clay even open sourced their internal memo explaining why and how they made the decision (it’s worth a read). The team at Clay shared an advanced preview with me, although this post is not sponsored by Clay and nor was the post shared with the company ahead of publication.

I’ll unpack the new pricing changes from Figma, PostHog, and Clay. And, more importantly, I’ll explain what these signal about where AI pricing might be headed next.

Figma introduced an AI credit model in December 2025. But they didn’t actually enforce it. Aside from the delayed enforcement, Figma’s credit pricing looks pretty similar to other credit models from the likes of HubSpot, Salesforce, monday, and others.

The mechanics at Figma:

Figma’s decision to offer three months of free credits was smart for a few reasons. It encouraged users to try Figma’s AI offerings and, hopefully, get hooked on them. It armed Figma with consumption and cost data from users in production. And it allowed Figma to collect feedback to finetune the exact pricing mechanics before sending out a bill.

They introduced usage tracking for both individual users and for admins and saw a ‘power law’ distribution in AI consumption. Figma says that 75% of paid customers with $10,000+ in ARR are consuming AI credits on a weekly basis. A subset of these users are already exceeding the credit limits, although Figma didn’t disclose the exact number.

The new pricing seems designed to help Figma sell more seats rather than simply sell credits. A Figma Dev seat comes with 500 credits per month. If these users upgrade to a full Professional seat, they’ll unlock 3,000 credits, worth an extra $60 per month – a massive savings relative to the cost of the seat upgrade ($5 per month). This is likely to encourage more customers to adopt Figma wall-to-wall.

What I struggle with is that there’s an inherent tension between whether Figma credits are value-based (you pay for work) or cost-based (you pay to cover their AI bills). Just take a look at the rate table below.

Making a prototype is a flat 20 credits per use. Generating an image, on the other hand, could set you back anywhere from 5 credits (about 12 cents) to 25 credits (about 60 cents). The difference: which LLM you select for generating the image.

The onus is on the user to make that price-value trade-off. Is Gemini 3 Pro really 3x better than Gemini 2.5? Is this use case valuable enough to splurge or am I OK with something lower quality? How would I know if I made the right decision?

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether users will benefit if (when?) LLM costs go down. This means they’re on the hook to constantly make cost optimization trade-offs without being fully in control of the tools to optimize their bill.

There’s an inherent tension between credits as cost-based or value-based. A cleaner approach would be dual-track monetization: delineate value (the platform) and cost (the tokens) into separate buckets.