Who owns pricing in an AI company?

I was reading Tremont's 2025 State of Monetization report where they talked about who owns pricing at different stages of company growth.

It states that:

• At <$1M ARR, 71% of companies say pricing is owned by the founder.

• At $5–20M ARR, ownership starts to fragment. Infact 21% of companies in this stage said "nobody" owns pricing.

• At > $20M ARR, it is primarily owned by Product teams while Finance, Sales and Operation teams takes the secondary role.

But here’s the part no one’s talking about: Even if nobody officially owns pricing, someone always ends up owning the mess.

It’s the developers.

Who really is an owner?

An owner is the individual (or team) accountable for the design, execution, maintenance, and evolution of a function or system. Ownership extends across decision-making, implementation, outcomes, and cross-functional alignment.

Here’s what that means in the context of pricing:

Product
Role: Owns the value side of pricing

• What are the key features being priced?

• How do we package product capabilities into tiers?

• What new capabilities justify a new price point

• What’s the difference between usage, feature, or outcome-based pricing for our product?

Sales
Role: Owns the narrative and negotiation

• Can I explain this pricing clearly to a customer?

• Does it align with how customers perceive value?

• Where are reps consistently asking for exceptions?

• Are discount structures sustainable or hurting margins?

• Are we getting blocked in deals because of our model?
  
  

Finance
Role: Owns forecasting and margin protection

• Does the model scale with our cost structure?

• Are we protecting gross margins, especially with AI infra?

• Can we model out revenue projections under different pricing schemes?

• Is our pricing aligned with cash collection goals (e.g. annual upfront)?

• What’s our effective ARPU per segment?
  
  

Marketing / Growth
Role: Owns positioning and packaging

• How do we communicate value clearly on our pricing page?

• Should we lead with “Free,” “Starts at $49,” or “Custom pricing”?

• What pricing experiments or A/B tests are we running?

• Are we driving trials and conversions effectively?
  
  

Founders / Execs
Role: Own the strategy and accountability

• Does our pricing reflect the value we deliver?

• Are we undercharging or overcomplicating?

• Who’s responsible when pricing breaks or stalls growth?

• Do we have the right systems and data to support experiments?

While ownership shifts across departments the execution burden consistently falls on engineering. It’s developers who end up implementing, revisiting, and rebuilding pricing systems every time the strategy changes. The one who gets the call when anything in pricing breaks, is the developers.

• Who implements the new pricing model?

• Who writes cron jobs to reset usage limits?

• Who handles real-time metering for GPU usage or token consumption?

• Who debugs invoice mismatches at 2AM?

• Who maintains internal dashboards for pricing drift?

It’s always the developers.

Here’s what the real ownership chart looks like:

So while GTM defines the plan, Finance approves the price, and Product drives packaging…

Developers own the pain.

Why this shift matters now?

In the AI era, value no longer scales with headcount. AI features, whether they're automating support, generating insights, or processing requests produce outcomes, not just access and billing has to follow that shift.

That’s why we’re seeing:

• Credit-based pricing

• Pay-per-outcome models

• Real-time metering based on infra usage

And these aren’t decisions that stay in the boardroom. They touch the product, infra as well as code.

At Flexprice, we believe pricing shouldn’t be a burden on developers but it should be an asset they can own with confidence.

So we built Flexprice as:

• Open-source

• API-first

• Real-time and event-driven

• Designed to support any pricing model: usage-based, credit-based, outcome-based, hybrid

We help teams:

• Define pricing logic once and version it

• Plug into usage events from their infra

• Roll out pricing changes without redeploying code

• Support complex entitlements, per-customer overrides, and success-based billing

So the next time someone in your company asks:

“Who owns pricing?”

Flip the question:

• Who’s building it?

• Who’s fixing it when it breaks?

• Who’s patching all the gaps when tools fall short?

• Who keeps it running when everyone else moves on?

It’s probably your developers.

And if they already own it maybe it’s time we gave them the infrastructure to do it right way or even better is the power to hand that ownership back.