The anatomy of a breakthrough “Service-as-a-Software” business

How Chargeflow’s unorthodox approach led to explosive growth

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ve probably noticed my fascination with how AI products are increasingly rewriting the rules of SaaS pricing.

Many of the next generation AI apps don’t simply provide a platform to make people more productive, they own a process from beginning to end. They autonomously resolve customer support tickets (Intercom), cull and edit photos (Aftershoot), run outbound campaigns (11x) or take on the role of a sales engineer (Vivun). This creates even more economic value for customers – and it facilitates a different way of capturing that value.

Rather than charging for people to access a product (seat-based pricing), I’m noticing more interest in charging for the work delivered by a combination of software and AI agents. In this world, we “hire” instead of “subscribe” and might be willing to pay more for “premium skills” (think: faster output, higher accuracy, SLAs) rather than “premium features”.

I’ve had a chance to see this shift first-hand at Char…