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Chamath: Consumption-based pricing models destroy software businesses in the long term

Chamath Palihapitiya · IPOs and SPACs are Back, Mag 7 Showdown, Zuck on Tilt, Apple's Fumble, GENIUS Act passes Senate · Jun 21, 2025 · at 1:10:53

Chamath Palihapitiya critiques SaaS companies pivoting to usage-based pricing models like Snowflake during a discussion on enterprise software disruption.

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“Consumption-based pricing. It doesn't work, and what I mean is, you can have some adoption in the short term. The best example is Snowflake, but in the long term, it destroys your business, and the reason is because you don't know which data is valuable, and you're not going to put up with a variable business model That increases more and more costs because you need to trap everything.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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