Hybrid Pricing Hits 37%, and Intuit Just Bought the Billing Fix

For most of the last decade, a software company's invoice was easy to predict: seats times price, billed monthly or annually. That arithmetic is breaking. Vendors now mix subscriptions with usage meters, AI credits, milestones and temporary ramps, and every new pricing experiment lands on the finance team as a billing problem. On October 15, Intuit put a price on that problem, or at least a strategy, by agreeing to buy Sequence, a London and New York company built to automate everything between a signed quote and recognized revenue. The deal is small in dollar terms and undisclosed, but it says something larger about where finance software competition has moved.

Pricing Changed Faster Than Billing

The scale of the pricing shift is visible in Growth Unhinged's 2026 State of B2B Monetization survey, which Kyle Poyar ran in April and May across 230 B2B software and AI companies. Hybrid pricing, a blend of fixed fees and usage-based charges, is now the most common model at 37% of respondents, up from 25% twelve months earlier. About three in four software companies changed their pricing or packaging in the past year. AI credits are used by 29% today, and another 33% plan to introduce them within 6 to 12 months.

Customers are being handed more choice, too: 29% of companies let buyers pick among several AI pricing models, up from 21% the year before. Each of those options is another rule the billing system has to calculate, invoice and recognize correctly. The survey also notes that usage-based and outcome-based companies report difficulty forecasting revenue, and that hybrid sellers struggle to explain their pricing to customers. Neither problem stays in the sales team. Both arrive in finance at month end as disputed invoices, unbilled usage and revenue that is hard to schedule.

That is the gap Sequence was built for. Its Series A announcement in December described a data model for usage tiers, seat overages, milestones, pricing ramps and temporary discounts, structures it argues legacy CPQ and billing systems cannot handle. The company raised $20 million in that round, led by 645 Ventures with a16z participating, bringing total funding to $38 million, and claimed 10x ARR growth over the year without disclosing an absolute figure. Named customers include AI companies such as Cognition and Runway, exactly the sellers whose consumption pricing changes fastest.

Why an ERP Vendor Wants the Billing Layer

Intuit's reasoning is explicit. In CFO Dive's report on the deal, Wyatt Jenkins, senior vice president of product for Intuit's mid-market group, said "mid-market businesses tell us that revenue management and revenue recognition are critical factors when choosing an ERP." Sequence co-founder and CEO Riya Grover put the pain more plainly: "Finance teams spend too much time on spreadsheets and manual workarounds just to understand what they've earned."

The mid-market is where Intuit is growing fastest. According to figures from its August earnings call cited by CFO Dive, mid-market revenue rose 39% in fiscal 2026 and mid-market customers grew 28%. Roughly three-quarters of those new additions came from existing QuickBooks customers upgrading or migrating from desktop products, and revenue from QuickBooks Online Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite grew 38% in the fourth quarter. Intuit expects desktop ecosystem revenue to decline in the low single digits in the coming fiscal year, which CFO Sandeep Aujla attributed to continued migration to online offerings.

Those migrating customers are the ones outgrowing simple invoicing. Intuit's announcement positions Sequence as a way into B2B software and professional services, as an alternative to legacy ERPs that still require manual revenue work. Grover called revenue management "the most fragmented workflow in the back office." Intuit says it will keep supporting Sequence's existing customers and build an integrated offering in the coming months, but has not given a closing date or product timeline, so buyers should treat the combined product as a roadmap rather than a feature.

Agents, With the Math Kept Deterministic

Sequence sells itself on AI agents that handle contract intake, invoice review and payment chasing. The more telling detail is the boundary it draws: the company says billing calculations stay deterministic, agent actions, data sources and reasoning are logged, and exceptions are routed to humans. That is the design finance leaders should insist on from any vendor. An agent that drafts a dunning email can be wrong cheaply. An agent that computes the amount owed cannot, because that figure flows straight into revenue recognition and the audit file.

Some of the surrounding claims deserve skepticism. Sequence's assertion that finance staff spend more than half their time on repetitive work such as manual invoicing, chasing payments and reconciliation is a vendor estimate, not survey data, and Intuit disclosed no financial terms that would show what it values the business at. The direction, though, is consistent across both buyer and seller: pricing complexity is rising, and the system that turns a contract into an invoice and an invoice into revenue is becoming the part of the stack that decides whether growth is bookable.

The Playbook: Make Billing Keep Up With Pricing

• Get a seat in pricing decisions: With three in four software companies changing pricing in a year, finance should review every new model for billability, revenue recognition treatment and forecast impact before it reaches a customer.
• Inventory your billing rules: List every seat tier, usage meter, credit pack, ramp and discount in force, and flag which ones are calculated in spreadsheets rather than in a system.
• Test the ERP on quote-to-revenue, not just the ledger: If you are moving off desktop accounting, ask vendors to demo a hybrid contract from quote through invoice, collection and recognized revenue, end to end.
• Keep the arithmetic deterministic: Use AI agents for intake, review and collections outreach, but require that amounts billed come from auditable rules with logged exceptions and human approval.
• Forecast usage separately: Usage and outcome pricing make revenue harder to predict, so model committed and variable revenue on different lines and track the variance every month.
• Treat roadmaps as roadmaps: Acquired capabilities take time to integrate. Contract for what ships today and tie any promised revenue management features to dated milestones.