# Who gets paid in the agent stack. Seats, meters and the year the labs went shopping (slim)

> Quynh Tran-Thanh on how the 1,644 listings on Anchor Terminal charge, which models the top-graded tools use, where funding went in the last twelve months, what a year of shutdowns and acquisitions says about whether SaaS survives and whether the labs are eating the market, and which businesses thrive next to a lab.

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By Quynh Tran-Thanh, 10 November 2026. 3,126 words, about 14 min to read.

Everyone I talk to has a version of the same two worries.

## How the stack charges today

Each listing records how the vendor charges.

- 593: freemium, a free tier and then plans
- 372: free, open source or no charge
- 333: seats or plans, no free tier
- 308: metered usage
- 38: bring your own plan

How 1,644 listings charge, 10 November 2026. Source [1].

The shape depends on what the thing costs to make.

Usage against seat pricing in the categories at each end, per cent of listings

| Category | Metered usage | Seats or plans |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Crypto exchanges | 90 | 0 |
| Voice calling | 87 | 7 |
| GPU compute | 76 | 5 |
| Inference | 62 | 5 |
| CRM | 0 | 70 |
| Support | 0 | 64 |
| Company knowledge | 0 | 65 |
| Recruiting | 0 | 80 |
| Payroll, tax and HR | 0 | 100 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

The middle of the catalogue is freemium.

## The top tier does not sell seats

Our grade measures quality and transparency against the benchmark, not traction.

How each tier charges, per cent of listings in the tier

| Tier | Metered usage | Freemium | Free | Seats or plans |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Grade A and AA, 28 listings | 44 | 24 | 32 | 0 |
| Top 50 by score | 44 | 28 | 26 | 2 |
| Top 250 | 28 | 42 | 22 | 8 |
| Grade C, 420 listings | 14 | 34 | 30 | 20 |
| Grade F, 141 listings | 9 | 34 | 15 | 40 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

Seat pricing goes from none of the A grades to 40 per cent of the F grades, and metering runs the other way [[1]](#ref-1).

Part of this is the benchmark itself.

## Where the money went

We record named investors and dated rounds for each listing.

Listings with a round dated November 2025 or later, by pricing model, per cent

| Pricing model | Per cent raised |
| --- | --- |
| Metered usage | 25 |
| Freemium | 14 |
| Free | 12 |
| Seats or plans | 9 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

Two qualifications.

## Who is growing

In public markets the split is by meter, not by sector.

Year on year revenue growth, per cent, as each company reports it

| Company | Growth |
| --- | --- |
| Figma, seats with AI credits | 43 |
| Cloudflare, metered | 39 |
| Snowflake, metered, product revenue | 37 |
| Datadog, metered | 35 |
| Workday, seats, subscription revenue | 14 |
| Salesforce, seats | 11 |
| Zoom, seats | 5 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

Among private companies, every one above 100 per cent growth with a dated figure is usage, credits or outcome priced, or sells inference.

## Is SaaS going to survive?

Yes, as an ex-growth model, and in specific places.

Seats hold where the buyer is a human team and the product is a system of record or replaces billable labour.

A year of seats and token costs, as reported

1. **January 2026** (margin positive). Gross margin about 50 per cent on fixed-price seats [[59]](#ref-59)
2. **Spring** (costs rising). Agent token use rises twentyfold, the seat price does not move [[59]](#ref-59)
3. **June** (margin negative). Gross margin about minus 50 per cent [[59]](#ref-59)
4. **August** (margin positive). Harvey ships its own model and the margin recovers [[59]](#ref-59)
5. **September** (price unchanged). Raises $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, still selling seats [[60]](#ref-60)
6. **1 October** (price unchanged). Says it has passed $400 million in ARR with 97 per cent gross retention [[15]](#ref-15)

The surveys say the same thing from the other side.

Which pricing model investors say they prefer, per cent

| Model | Investors preferring it |
| --- | --- |
| Hybrid | 35 |
| Outcome | 26 |
| Usage | 24 |
| Seats | 5 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

Benchmarkit puts median net revenue retention at 108 per cent for usage-based companies and 98 per cent for seat-based, from a 230-company cut whose usage-based subset it does not size [[18]](#ref-18).

So hybrid, not a clean switch.

The reason none of this is comfortable is margin.

## Are the labs eating the market?

Partly, and in one specific place.

The 47, by who did it

| Who | Companies or products |
| --- | --- |
| Bought by an incumbent or another startup | 24 |
| Bought by a frontier lab | 12 |
| A lab retiring its own product | 6 |
| Shut or pivoted on its own | 5 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

How long a lab kept the hosted product running after buying it

| Who | Time | Outcome |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Conductor, to Meta | 16 days | cloud shuts on 20 November |
| Vercept, to Anthropic | 28 days | Vy switched off |
| Ona, to OpenAI | 142 days | Ona Cloud shut on 31 October |
| Promptfoo, to OpenAI | still open | the open-source tool kept and supported |

Time on a log scale.

The pattern in those twelve is the thinnest layers between the model and the developer.

Three things complicate the story.

First, most exits were incumbents buying, not labs, and the products kept running.

Second, the labs killed their own agent products at the same rate.

Third, the market panic was specific and indiscriminate at once.

## Who thrives next to a lab

The question I get asked most is the inverse.

Start with our data.

In the 37 categories where a frontier lab has a listing, whose listing is graded best

| Who has the best grade | Categories |
| --- | --- |
| Someone who is not a lab | 15 |
| A tie | 16 |
| A frontier lab | 6 |

Each series has a zero-based scale.

The labs lead in inference, open weights and advertising.

Outside the catalogue the pattern is the one Snowflake and Datadog ran on AWS, and it comes down to a few traits.

- Neutrality the lab cannot offer. A router that sends traffic between labs is worth more than any one lab's router. Menlo, an OpenRouter investor, wrote that it had the highest uptime of even frontier models because it could contract across providers [[49]](#ref-49). The counter-case is Cursor. Once SpaceX owned it, OpenAI said it would stop supplying models, with the shutoff set for 12 November [[50]](#ref-50).
- A cost of goods the lab does not want to carry. Expert data is people-heavy and low margin. Mercor reached a $2 billion gross run-rate with about 91 per cent of it from OpenAI and Anthropic [[51]](#ref-51). Serving open-weight and custom models is the same trade in compute, which is where Modal and Fireworks sit.
- Liability and humans in a regulated vertical. Harvey puts a former lawyer in every deployment [[62]](#ref-62), and Anthropic's healthcare lead said of Abridge that there is no need to reinvent the wheel when a product already serves the use case [[52]](#ref-52). Anthropic shipped Claude for Legal in May and Harvey's valuation went up anyway.
- Data the model cannot train on. The analysts who called the February bottom named FICO, Moody's, S&P Global, Verisk and Thomson Reuters as the beneficiaries [[53]](#ref-53).
- A modality the labs treat as second priority. ElevenLabs passed $500 million in ARR in the first four months of the year, by its own account, selling by the character and the minute [[54]](#ref-54).
- Owning the end user and the deployed artefact. Lovable and Replit sell to people who are not developers and host what they build. The labs sell the editor to developers.

What does not survive is the mirror image.

![The lab keeps the model, inference, open weights, advertising and the developer's editor.

Where you can stand next to a lab.

Sarah Guo's version is the one I keep coming back to.

## What stays

From the exits and the funding together, the categories that neither the labs nor the incumbents have touched share one of three traits.

- Metered infrastructure one layer below the model. Inference clouds, sandboxes, search and browser APIs, databases that agents provision. Menlo's survey has code-sandbox adoption among AI builders going from 11 to 40 per cent in a year and search from 5 to 30 per cent [[39]](#ref-39).
- Per-minute voice APIs, despite native lab voice. Sacra estimates Retell at about $80 million annualised on $4.6 million raised [[40]](#ref-40). The telephony integration is the moat.
- Outcome-priced agents with a countable unit. Fin charges $0.99 per outcome, unchanged since Salesforce completed the purchase in September [[48]](#ref-48), and Bessemer had it on track for $100 million in ARR a year ago [[41]](#ref-41).
- Vertical seat businesses that replace billable labour, Harvey being the case, as long as they can carry the inference cost. Harvey answered that by training its own model, not by changing the price.
- The metering, billing and choice layer itself.
- Data and payment rails the labs will not own. In our catalogue these are old, seat or usage priced, and untouched.

- 11% to 40%: AI builders using a code sandbox, in a year
- 5% to 30%: AI builders using a search API, in a year
- $0.99: per outcome, Fin's price before and after Salesforce
- $500M: ElevenLabs' ARR, by the character and the minute
- ~$80M: Retell's annualised revenue on $4.6 million raised

What the survivors sell by.

What goes is a hosted wrapper around a single model capability, a standalone vector store (Chroma Cloud is being wound down after Chroma agreed to join Replit, writes off on 7 December and reads on 22 December [[42]](#ref-42)), a low-code builder (Flowise announced end of life on 29 July, with its maintainer saying coding agents had taken over the job [[43]](#ref-43)), and anything whose roadmap is the next model release.

## What I'd watch

The categories where our top quartile already charges differently from the rest are the ones mid-migration, and in every case the top is metered while the rest sell plans.

---

More in [From the data](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/from-the-data/index.md) · Previous from the data [The best harnesses for a personal agent, by our grades](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/best-harnesses-for-personal-agents.md)

- Older: [A machine that builds the benchmark](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/a-machine-that-builds-the-benchmark.md)
- Newer: [What Sapolsky's first lecture means for LLMs and decision models](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/sapolsky-first-lecture-decision-models.md)
- All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md

Anchor Terminal grades the tools AI agents run on, with a source for every score.

## References

Sources read on 10 November 2026 unless stated.

[1] Anchor Terminal, the category pages and the listing data behind them, 10 November 2026. Source for the pricing mix across 1,644 listings, by category, kind, grade and score tier, for the lab share of listings, and for the unchanged popularity fields since the 3 October data.

[2] Anchor Terminal, people and investor records on the listing pages, 10 November 2026. Source for rounds dated November 2025 or later by pricing model and category, and for the most frequent investors.

[3] Snowflake, Form 8-K exhibit, second quarter fiscal 2027 results, August 2026. Source for product revenue growth of 37 per cent.

[4] Cloudflare, third quarter 2026 financial results, 5 November 2026. Source for revenue growth of 39 per cent.

[5] Datadog, Form 8-K exhibit, third quarter 2026 results, 4 November 2026. Source for revenue growth of 35 per cent.

[6] Salesforce, second quarter fiscal 2027 results, 26 August 2026. Source for revenue growth of 11 per cent.

[7] Workday, fiscal 2027 second quarter financial results, 27 August 2026. Source for subscription revenue growth of 13.9 per cent.

[8] Zoom, second quarter fiscal 2027 results, 25 August 2026. Source for revenue growth of 4.9 per cent.

[9] Figma, Form 8-K exhibit, third quarter 2026 results, 4 November 2026. Source for revenue growth of 43 per cent and GAAP gross margin of 80 per cent.

[10] The Next Web, Modal raises $750M at $15.75bn valuation as run rate tops $1bn, 14 October 2026. Source for Modal's stated run-rate and growth at its Series D.

[11] Sacra, Exa company profile, September 2026. Source for Sacra's estimate of Exa's annualised revenue and the year-earlier figure.

[12] Sacra, Turbopuffer company profile, March 2026. Source for Sacra's estimate of Turbopuffer's annualised revenue and capital raised.

[13] TechCrunch, Lovable says it has hit $500M in annualized revenue with 1 million new projects a week, 9 June 2026. Source for the $500 million figure as Lovable stated it.

[14] Sacra, Supabase at $170M/year growing 221% YoY, 11 June 2026. Source for Sacra's estimate of Supabase's ARR and growth; the $500 million raise is from TechCrunch, 5 June 2026. https://sacra.com/research/supabase-170m-year-growing-221-yoy/

[15] Harvey, post on X, 1 October 2026. Source for the $400 million ARR and 97 per cent gross retention figures as Harvey reported them.

[16] Growth Unhinged, Kyle Poyar, The state of B2B SaaS and AI monetization in 2026, 13 May 2026. Source for the hybrid share, investor preferences and the AI credits figures.

[17] SaaStr, ten metrics from ICONIQ's 2026 State of AI report, July 2026. Source for what SaaStr reported of ICONIQ's consumption, outcome and subscription shares.

[18] Benchmarkit, 2026 SaaS and AI-native metrics benchmarks.

[19] Replit, Effort-based pricing, 18 June 2025. Source for the move to effort-based agent pricing.

[20] Cursor, Teams pricing, June 2026. Source for the seat tiers with two usage pools.

[21] Bessemer Venture Partners, The AI pricing and monetization playbook, 10 February 2026. Source for the gross margin ranges for AI companies and SaaS.

[22] TechCrunch, Stripe didn't really buy OpenRouter because of the singularity, 19 August 2026. Source for what TechCrunch reported of the acquisition, its price and OpenRouter's take rate.

[23] TechCrunch, Anthropic acquires Vercept, 25 February 2026. Source for the acquisition and the shutdown of the Vy agent.

[24] TechCrunch, Anthropic has acquired the dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare, 18 May 2026. Source for the acquisition and the wind-down of all hosted Stainless products.

[25] Mendral, Mendral team joins Anthropic, 21 July 2026. Source for the acqui-hire and the founders' statement about model progress.

[26] SiliconANGLE, OpenAI acquires Ona, 11 June 2026. Source for the acquisition and the shutdown of Ona Cloud.

[27] TechCrunch, Meta acquires AI coding startup Conductor, 4 November 2026. Source for the acquisition and the cloud shutdown date.

[28] Google, Jules changelog, Jules turndown, 29 October 2026. Source for Jules turning read-only on 11 November 2026 and winding down on 31 December 2026. https://jules.google/docs/changelog/

[29] Anchor Terminal, Sunsets, 10 November 2026. Source for the PlayHT, Hume and Runloop shutdown notices and the count of shutdown notices in the catalogue since November 2025. https://www.anchorterminal.com/sunsets/

[30] CNBC, Salesforce to acquire Fin, 15 June 2026. Source for what CNBC reported of the price.

[31] SiliconANGLE, Salesforce to buy Cresta for a reported $2.7 billion, 3 November 2026. Source for what SiliconANGLE reported of the price.

[32] Dynatrace, Dynatrace completes acquisition of Arize, 1 October 2026. Source for the $915 million price and the completion.

[33] SiliconANGLE, Nebius buys agentic search startup Tavily, 10 February 2026. Source for the price and earn-out as reported.

[34] OpenAI, API deprecations.

[35] Android Authority, OpenAI is sunsetting ChatGPT Atlas, July 2026. Source for what Android Authority reported of the announcement and shutdown dates.

[36] CNBC, Anthropic's new tools spark software stock selloff, 6 February 2026. Source for what CNBC reported of the trigger and the moves.

[37] ETF Trends, Tech ETFs in Q1, the fracturing of one tech trade, 31 March 2026. Source for the IGV decline of 24 per cent in the first quarter, its worst since 2008. https://www.etftrends.com/tech-etfs-q1-fracturing-one-tech-trade/

[38] CNBC, Software stocks plunge on ServiceNow and IBM results, 23 April 2026. Source for what CNBC reported of ServiceNow's record fall and Workday's year to date decline.

[39] Menlo Ventures, 2026, the state of enterprise AI, 3 November 2026. Source for code-sandbox and search adoption among the AI builders surveyed.

[40] Sacra, Retell AI company profile, August 2026. Source for Sacra's estimate of Retell's annualised revenue and capital raised.

[41] Bessemer Venture Partners, Cloud built the foundation, AI is now rewriting the rules, November 2025. Source for Fin's per-resolution price and the ARR trajectory Bessemer reported.

[42] Chroma, Chroma Cloud wind-down.

[43] FlowiseAI, Flowise end of life discussion, 29 July 2026. Source for the code freeze, archive date and the maintainer's reason.

[44] OpenAI, OpenAI to acquire Promptfoo, 9 March 2026. Source for Promptfoo staying open source and supported after the acquisition.

[45] Inworld, Migrate from PlayHT, 2026. Source for the PlayHT platform closure after Meta hired the team.

[46] Bloomberg, Get me out, traders dump software stocks as AI fears erupt, 3 February 2026. Source for the start of the selloff on 3 February and the Jefferies trader who coined SaaSpocalypse.

[47] Salesforce, Salesforce completes acquisition of Fin, 10 September 2026. Source for the completion date and Fin being the company formerly called Intercom.

[48] Fin, Pricing, read 10 November 2026. Source for the $0.99 per outcome price.

[49] Menlo Ventures, Stripe to acquire OpenRouter, why everyone is obsessed with model routing, 19 August 2026. Source for Menlo's account of OpenRouter's uptime and cross-provider contracts.

[50] InfoWorld, Cursor customers will lose access to OpenAI coding models in November, 31 August 2026. Source for OpenAI's decision and the 12 November shutoff.

[51] Dealroom, Mercor doubles to $2B gross revenue run rate as AI labs buy expert data, 6 July 2026. Source for Mercor's stated gross run-rate and the share from OpenAI and Anthropic as reported.

[52] MedCity News, Anthropic says it is critical to bring company products to the EHR, February 2026. Source for the quoted remark about Abridge.

[53] CNBC, Anthropic goes from software foe to friend, these stocks should benefit, 25 February 2026. Source for the analysts' list of data owners expected to benefit.

[54] ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs crosses $500M ARR and welcomes new investors, May 2026. Source for the $500 million ARR figure as ElevenLabs stated it.

[55] TechCrunch, Anthropic co-founder on cutting access to Windsurf, 5 June 2025. Source for Anthropic ending Windsurf's direct access during OpenAI's bid.

[56] a16z, Joe Schmidt, Avoiding death on the Yellow Brick Road, 27 May 2026. Source for the Yellow Brick Road framing of horizontal tasks the labs win.

[57] Anthropic, Claude Code sandboxing documentation, read 10 November 2026. Source for the open-sourced sandbox runtime.

[58] Colossus, Sarah's wager, July 2026. Source for Sarah Guo's quoted remarks on lab priorities.

[59] The Next Web, AI model costs are pushing startups towards cheaper open weight models, 21 September 2026. Source for what Bloomberg reported of Harvey's gross margin and token growth.

[60] Harvey, Harvey raises $550M at a $15.5B valuation to help legal teams own their intelligence, 9 September 2026. Source for the round.

[61] Harvey, Making Harvey the orchestration layer for legal work, 15 October 2026. Source for the orchestration and connector positioning.

[62] SaaStr, Harvey puts a former practicing lawyer in every deployment, 2 September 2026. Source for the forward-deployed pod model as Harvey's product chief described it.

[63] Ona, Anthropic model access in Ona, 5 August 2026. Source for the Ona Cloud shutdown on 31 October 2026 as Ona announced it.

[64] The Next Web, Lovable says two-thirds of the Fortune 500 use it and revenue hit $600m, 24 September 2026. Source for the $600 million figure as Lovable's CTO stated it.

[65] OpenRouter, Pricing, read 10 November 2026. Source for the 5.5 per cent fee on credit purchases and no markup on inference.