SaaS Metrics School

Is gross revenue retention under attack at your SaaS company? The latest benchmark data says the ground has shifted under everyone. In episode #380, Ben Murray breaks down the latest SaaS gross revenue retention benchmarks from Ray Rike's Benchmarkit report, the same data set Ben uses to benchmark his own client base. GRR is one of the power three metrics, and it is hard to scale without it. Prici...

AI ARR is easy to announce. Proving it is where most SaaS finance teams are about to get exposed. In episode #379, Ben Murray tackles the new bar for AI financial transparency and what it means for your next budget season. The public markets have already moved the goalposts. Launching AI was the 2024 story. Reporting AI ARR was the 2025 story. Now investors and boards want to see AI margins, custo...

Is your SaaS company stuck in the valuation doghouse while a handful of names trade at a massive premium? In episode #378, Ben Murray breaks down Meritech's June 2026 public software comps report and the widening valuation gap across SaaS. The median revenue multiple has fallen 64% from its pre-ZIRP peak, and most public software now trades below 5X. If you are a SaaS founder or CFO, the multiple...

Everyone says seat-based pricing is dead, but do you actually have an outcome you can charge for? In episode #377, Ben Murray breaks down the 12 steps to building an outcome-based pricing plan, drawn from analyzing real, live outcome-based pricing pages and the fine print buried in their terms and conditions. Outcome pricing is complex to design and even harder for customers to understand: when ar...

Is your 2027 software budget ready for the AI spend that's about to blow past every forecast you've built? In episode #376, Ben Murray covers five takeaways for CFOs from the Pricing I/O AI Pricing Report, produced in partnership with Benchmarkit, which surveyed 296 software buyers in Q1 2026. With budget season around the corner and demand for tokens, agentic AI, and tools like ChatGPT and Claude...

Do you actually know which of your AI customers are making you money and which are quietly destroying your gross margin? In episode #375, Ben Murray breaks down the shape of AI usage and why the distribution curve of your customers determines whether your AI subscription product is profitable. This is why Anthropic and GitHub changed their pricing. Heavy users on a flat subscription can quietly tu...

The pricing model that built the SaaS industry is being replaced in real time. Is your finance team ready for what it does to your core metrics? In episode #374, Ben Murray breaks down the four SaaS P&L metrics that break when per-seat pricing dies. Public tech leaders are already shifting fast. ServiceNow now drives 50% of net new business from non-seat-based pricing, Workday is reporting hun...

Is per-seat pricing dying a slow death, and is your SaaS expense structure ready for its replacement? In episode #373, Ben Murray breaks down the shift from per-seat subscriptions to usage and outcome-based pricing, and what it means for your finance org. Bloomberg projects subscription pricing falling from 60% to 30% of SaaS models over the next decade, while outcome-based pricing climbs from 10%...

Are you a legacy SaaS company quietly hoping for a recovery that isn't coming? In episode #372, Ben Murray breaks down two slides from Jason Lemkin's State of SaaS keynote at SaaStr Annual that every SaaS operator and CFO needs to confront. The four categories Lemkin laid out will tell you exactly where your company sits in the AI transition, and whether your ARR growth is real or borrowed time. I...

If you're shipping AI product lines, are you measuring the two metrics that actually tell you whether your AI is making money — or burning it? In episode #371, Ben Murray covers two AI unit economics metrics every SaaS CFO and founder should be tracking today: the Inference Expense Ratio and the Work-to-Inference Ratio. Traditional SaaS metrics aren't enough anymore — and a year from now, when you...

Are AI inference costs already eating into your gross margin — and you can't even see them on your P&L? In episode #370, Ben Murray breaks down exactly what belongs in AI COGS for SaaS companies offering an AI-first or AI-infused product line. Inference bills are stacking up fast, infrastructure-layer spend is the surprise line item nobody priced in, and most finance teams haven't built the GL...

Did your AI bill just jump overnight — even though no one announced a price increase? In episode #369, Ben Murray breaks down the hidden AI price hike that's quietly hitting SaaS P&Ls this month. Anthropic shipped a new tokenizer underneath Claude Opus 4.7 — same menu pricing as 4.6, but real enterprise workloads are showing 12-27% higher effective cost, with some prompts consuming up to 35% m...

Can you actually prove what your AI product is doing for customers — or are you still pointing at token counts and hoping the board nods along? In episode #368, Ben Murray breaks down the four layers of AI measurement that every SaaS company needs to communicate internally and externally. Token usage is table stakes. The real question is whether you can move up the stack from consumption to work p...

Salesforce just invented a new metric on their latest earnings call — not because they needed one, but because Wall Street didn't have the vocabulary to value what they built. In episode #366, Ben Murray breaks down Salesforce's Q4 FY2026 earnings call — not the financials, but the narrative architecture: a new unit of measurement for AI value (the AWU), a framing strategy designed to neutralize t...

HubSpot's 50-cent bet may have just forced every SaaS founder to ask whether their current revenue model is still defensible. In episode #365, Ben Murray breaks down HubSpot's April 2nd announcement — slashing its Breeze customer agent from $1 to 50¢ per resolved conversation, plus a shift on its prospecting agent to $1 per qualified lead — and what this risk transfer means for SaaS revenue, forec...

Is your AI SaaS company skating on thin ice because of exploding compute costs you're not tracking? In episode #365, Ben Murray tackles one of the most pressing financial challenges facing AI-first SaaS companies: the structural margin compression caused by LLM inference costs. Traditional SaaS was built on near-zero marginal cost per customer — that era is over. If you're building on top of AI, e...

In episode #364, Ben Murray breaks down how SaaS finance teams should structure their chart of accounts to properly track inference costs, productivity AI, and agentic AI spend. As organizations shift from W-2 headcount to token costs and agentic software, your current expense coding may be out-of-date. If you can't see where the AI spend is going, you can't tie it to ROI — and you definitely can'...

Is your SaaS company competing for funding in a market that's already decided AI wins? The Q1 2026 data is in — and the numbers are decisive. If you're a SaaS founder thinking about your next raise — or a CFO modeling out valuation scenarios — understanding where investors are actually writing checks matters more than ever. In epsiode #363, Ben Murray covers: Which software categories dominated Q1...

Are you feeding raw financial data straight into AI and wondering why the results are inconsistent — or worse, just wrong? AI is only as good as the data architecture underneath it. For SaaS CFOs and operators running monthly FP&A cycles, that means the order of operations matters enormously. Skip the deterministic compute layer, and your AI narrates garbage. Get the structure right, and sudde...

Everyone's saying AI will kill SaaS — but is the SaaSpocalypse actually real, or just the latest wave of disruption that enterprise software has survived before? If you're a SaaS founder or operator watching vibe-coded apps spin up overnight, the fear is real. But the narrative is missing something critical: enterprise software isn't just code, and the moats that protect your ARR aren't going away...

Is the “SaaSpocalypse” real—or just another wave of disruption you need to navigate? If you’re building or scaling a SaaS company, the rapid rise of AI agents, lower barriers to entry, and shifting pricing models could directly impact your growth, revenue predictability, and competitive edge. Understanding these changes isn’t optional—it’s critical to staying relevant and defensible in an AI-drive...

Are finance teams implementing AI the wrong way? In episode #359, Ben Murray argues that many CFOs and finance leaders are approaching AI backward—focusing too much on prompts and quick wins rather than building the foundational data infrastructure required for meaningful, repeatable insights. Drawing from recent AI webinars and his experience building softwaremetrics.ai, Ben explains why SaaS met...

What sparked the recent “SaaSpocalypse” conversation across social media, news outlets, and investor circles? In episode #358 of SaaS Metrics School, Ben Murray explains how the debate around AI potentially disrupting SaaS began. Ben breaks down what actually started the conversation, the major concerns investors and operators are discussing, and why SaaS founders and CFOs should pay attention to...

Is AI killing SaaS? Ben argues the opposite. In episode #357 of SaaS Metrics School, Ben Murray explains why AI isn’t replacing SaaS companies — it’s amplifying subject matter expertise. Drawing on his experience building SoftwareMetrics.ai with AI coding tools, he walks through how he would not be able to create a useful expert without domain knowledge. It doens't just apply to Ben. Resources Men...

In episode #356, Ben shares the results from the FP&A category of his 7th Annual SaaS Tech Stack Survey, highlighting the top financial planning and analysis solutions used in software companies today. With 37 FP&A solutions named in the survey, this remains one of the most competitive and fast-moving segments in the back-office tech stack. While spreadsheets still dominate usage—by a wide...