loading
loading
We run SaaStr with 3 humans and 21+ agents. 10K, our AI VP of Revenue, started as a simple dashboard and now runs most of our outbound, inbound and revenue ops. Across all the apps it touches, it makes 35,000 to 40,000 API calls a day. None of our vendors ever charged us for that. Now Salesforce, Atlassian and HubSpot are all adding charges for agent access, and one estimate we got puts our cost at as much as $240,000 a year. Amelia and I spent most of the latest episode of The Agents on what this looks like as a buyer. We also covered an analysis 10K ran on 22,000 paid SaaStr AI Annual attendees, which showed 49.7% of them changed jobs in the last 16 months. Salesforce, HubSpot and Atlassian Are All Charging for Agent Access Salesforce is rolling it out now, with a banner at login telling us we’ll pay more for agent access. Atlassian already did it, and it’s one of the reasons they’ve seen growth. HubSpot is doing it as well, but so far it looks aimed at their own first-party agents. They don’t appear to be charging yet for third-party agents like 10K, which I’d prefer. I get why. Every seat-based vendor is seeing contraction because of agents. We have one API seat at Salesforce and we don’t need 20 or 80. If I were running a B2B company that had been around for years and saw seat expansion at risk, we’d be having the same conversation and we’d probably land on the same answer. And in B2B, price increases have mostly worked. Customers complain about the 11th increase in a row, and more of them stay than leave. Bending Spoons built a business on this. They buy Evernote, double or triple the price, and make much more from the customers who stay than they lose from the ones who churn. One Estimate: $240,000 a Year to Keep Running 10K the Way We Run It We don’t know yet exactly what each vendor will charge. The one estimate we have is as much as $240,000 a year to keep using 10K the way we do now. We’re not a Fortune 10 company, and we’re not going to pay that, or quadruple what we pay a vendor, for API access. Some of this is on us. 10K was never constrained because nobody charged for API calls, so we used them like gas in a country where it costs 5 cents a gallon. And 40,000 calls a day costs almost nothing at what a modern database like Supabase charges. 10K’s First Suggestion: Mirror the Data to a $5 Postgres Instance Once we knew metering was coming, Amelia had 10K install a tracker on its own API usage for a week. 10K came back and said a lot of those calls could be cut, down to a bare minimum, as a short-term fix. Its longer-term suggestion was to mirror the system of record into our own Postgres database and stop calling the vendor as much. It offered to set that up the same day. That has costs. We’d have a system of record plus a mirror, they’d need to sync, and they’d get out of sync sometimes. But a $5 Postgres instance with no API limits against $240,000 a year is an easy call for an agent. Other people have written about this as the big risk for systems of record. 10K proposed it as soon as it heard about the pricing. Marketo Gave Our Agent 10 to 20 Minutes of API a Day We’ve already lived the extreme case. Marketo would go down on us after 10 or 20 minutes each day because of API limits. It was a mission-critical app that our agent could only reach for 20 minutes a day, so we migrated off it. I think metered pricing will get the same reaction from agents, just more slowly. We Might Not Pick Any of Our Current Stack Starting From Scratch Staying with vendors we already have is one decision, and the Bending Spoons math may hold there for a while. Buying new is a different decision. I doubt an agent would recommend any system of record that charges materially for API access. If we started from zero today knowing what agent access might cost, we might use none of our current stack. I’m not sure the incumbents see the opening that creates. Some vendors are going the other way. Dharmesh Shah talks all the time about how important it is for HubSpot not to charge for general agent access. I’d bet a lot of people in revenue roles there disagree with him. At a sponsor and VIP event we held around Dreamforce, the CEO and CTO of Aurasell told us the last thing they’d do is charge extra for agent access. They started as a next-generation CRM competitor and are now more of a layer on top of Salesforce and HubSpot, and they want people using it as much as possible. Muse Is Free and Does Work We Used to Buy $50K to $100K Apps For Muse is subsidized by Meta. It probably costs them at least a couple of dollars a month per user to run the VMs, and it comes with LLMs, a database and memory built in. We use it for customer tracking and competitor tracking, and we’re starting to run ads in it. Those are things $50,000 and $100,000 B2B apps do for us today. David on our team doesn’t use 10K and doesn’t log into our AI SDRs. Amelia programs those for him. But he started building his own sales workflows in Muse without anyone asking, because he already had a Meta account and it was easy. It took Amelia weeks to find a use case because Muse couldn’t run ads. That shipped this week, for Facebook platform ads only. She’s running it head to head against Claude and Replit, which is how she runs our ads today, and we’ll share results next episode. The Cloud Index Is Up 18% and Seat-Only Vendors Are Still Getting Crushed A third of the way through this year, every B2B software stock was down no matter how the company was doing. The cloud index is now up 18% for the year. It’s very bifurcated. Vendors that only sell per seat and have nothing agentic are still struggling, and Monday and HubSpot are in that group. Okta, Atlassian and Cloudflare are on fire because they’re AI and agent friendly. 22,000 Paid Attendees, and Half Changed Jobs in 16 Months Amelia was doing outbound to our paid ticket holders and ran the list through ZoomInfo and Clay. Then she had 10K analyze it. The data set is 22,000+ paid attendees from SaaStr AI Annual 2025, 2026 and early 2027 buyers, with free passes, sponsors and speakers removed. The caveat is that these are people who paid and traveled, many from across the world, to an event that has changed a lot. People who are less AI focused may be staying home. 1. AI-native titles and companies are up 4x in one year. Between May 2025 and May 2026, attendees with AI in their title or at a company with AI in its name became about four times more common. 2. 25% of our sponsors are hiring a go-to-market engineer. That was true the morning we recorded. 3. CEOs own AI, then GTM leaders, then COOs. That’s 10K’s ranking of who is most likely to own AI at these companies. 4. 49.7% of executives changed jobs in the last 16 months, and 63% of CMOs did. We’ve always known our event buyers, who are usually CMOs, tend to be gone by the next Annual. We’d never measured it. I’d plan on your CMO not being there in two years and on half your executives turning over. 5. More than 75% of AI-native attendees had never been to SaaStr before. I’d have guessed 50/50, with half being pre-AI B2B execs who moved over. The news the week we recorded was similar. The CEO of MongoDB left a $53 million pay package after 11 months for an enterprise leadership role at Meta. Snowflake’s first sales leader left for Cognition, which just crossed $1 billion in ARR. Jack Altman from Benchmark argued the upside when he joined us on 20VC. If executives are this mobile, you can recruit people you couldn’t have reached two years ago. Amelia hears it from sponsors too. The number one thing they ask her for help with, outside of SaaStr, is hiring. What We Changed This Week - 10K now tracks its own API calls. We had never looked. - We’re cutting the calls 10K flagged as unnecessary. - The Postgres mirror is on the table for any vendor whose agent pricing lands near the $240,000 estimate. - We re-enrich our buyer list continuously, since most of last year’s CMO buyers have moved. - Muse is getting tested on ads against Claude and Replit.
document fetched 2026-10-03 02:56 · canonical https://saastr.com/we-got-a-240000-estimate-for-agent-api-access-our-agent-suggested-a-5-postgres-instance