The infrastructure repricing
AI is forcing SaaS to evolve. The companies that modernize their payment infrastructure will re-rate. The rest won't survive the transition.
Santiago Roel Santos · February 2026 · 12 min read
The SaaS market now rewards retention, margins, and revenue quality with 2-3x multiple premiums.[1] Payment infrastructure migration is the only single operational change that improves all four valuation-driving metrics simultaneously.
This article is a companion to our Payment Infrastructure Calculator, which models the specific dollar impact for individual businesses. What follows is the case for why we believe subscription SaaS is mispriced and why payment infrastructure is the value creation lever the market has not yet recognized.
Payment infrastructure is eroding subscription unit economics.
Every subscription business running on traditional card rails pays an infrastructure tax that never appears on an invoice. It materializes as customers who silently disappear when a card expires, as 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction in processing fees, and as the entire dunning management industry that exists to compensate for infrastructure deficiencies with retry logic and email campaigns.
Stripe recovered $6.5 billion in failed payments through its Smart Retries system in 2024.[4] That is a single processor. The best dunning tools salvage 60-70% of failed payments; the industry average is closer to 47%.[5] The remainder is permanent revenue leakage: customers who were using the product, had no intention of canceling, and were lost because a piece of plastic expired every 3-5 years.[6]
Same product. Same price. Same voluntary churn rate. Same customer acquisition rate. The only variable is the payment infrastructure. Over 36 months, the cumulative gap compounds to millions in lost ARR. This is not a product problem or a market problem. It is an infrastructure cost that accrues in every cohort, every month, permanently.
The market now rewards exactly the metrics that payment infrastructure suppresses.
The post-2022 SaaS rerating changed what drives multiples. Growth alone no longer commands premiums. The 2026 market rewards retention, margin quality, churn discipline, and revenue predictability. Companies clearing the Rule of 40 command multiples roughly 2x those that fall below.[7] NRR above 120% is one of the strongest predictors of premium valuations.[1]
Payment infrastructure migration touches all four of these levers simultaneously. No product improvement, no go-to-market optimization, no cost reduction initiative moves NRR, gross margin, logo churn, and revenue auditability in a single deployment. This is why we underwrite payment infrastructure in every subscription deal we evaluate.
AI broke the pricing model. What comes next is harder to bill.
Per-seat pricing, the model that powered two decades of SaaS growth, is in measurable decline. Seat-based pricing dropped from 21% to 15% of B2B SaaS companies in 12 months, while hybrid pricing surged from 27% to 41%.[8] When an AI agent can do the work of five people, charging per seat penalizes the customer for efficiency and the vendor for delivering it.
Intercom moved from per-seat pricing to $0.99 per resolution for AI agents, down from $39 per agent seat.[9] HubSpot and Salesforce adopted credit-based pricing models in 2025.[10] Gartner projects that, in its best-case scenario, agentic AI could drive up to 30% of enterprise software revenue by 2035.[11] The pricing model is migrating, and every new model is harder to bill on card rails.
Smart contract rails: zero decline opportunities across all models. The payment either executes or it does not.
The industry is simultaneously making billing more complex and more frequent while running it on infrastructure designed for one fixed monthly charge. Each additional billing event on card rails is another opportunity for a decline code, another retry window, another point of involuntary churn. Smart contract rails are not just a solution to the churn problem. They are the native infrastructure for the pricing models the industry is migrating toward.
Stablecoins do not patch the failure mode. They eliminate it.
Credit cards were designed in the 1950s for discrete, in-person transactions. Recurring billing is a layer added after the fact: the merchant stores a credential and re-presents it on a schedule, hoping the credential remains valid and the authorization chain returns a success code. When any link breaks, the payment fails and the merchant has no recourse except retry.
Credit-based AI billing is converging on the same architecture as stablecoin subscription wallets: a pre-funded balance, programmatic draws against that balance, and automated replenishment. Card rails introduce a failure mode at the top-up charge. Stablecoin rails eliminate it. The infrastructure that AI-driven pricing models require is the infrastructure that stablecoins already provide.
The prerequisites converged in 2024-2025.
Stripe launched stablecoin subscription payments via smart contract, with over 400 wallets supported. Payments settle in fiat through existing Stripe billing infrastructure. No parallel stack required. Merchants manage stablecoin and traditional subscriptions from the same dashboard.
Coinbase Smart Wallet creates a non-custodial wallet using a passkey (FaceID, fingerprint) in seconds. No seed phrase. No browser extension. No app download. The friction gap between entering a card number and connecting a wallet has compressed significantly.
The GENIUS Act established a federal framework for payment stablecoins, including a pathway for OCC-chartered payment stablecoin issuers. The regulatory ambiguity that kept institutional capital on the sideline has been substantially resolved.
You keep Stripe. You add a second payment option.
Migration does not mean ripping out your billing stack. It does not mean asking your customers to buy cryptocurrency. It means adding stablecoin as a payment method alongside cards, the same way businesses added Apple Pay or ACH. Stripe already supports this natively. The merchant dashboard, invoicing, revenue recognition, and reporting stay the same. Payments settle in fiat. Your finance team never touches a token.
Enable USDC as a payment method through Stripe. Your existing checkout flow gets a second button. Customers who prefer cards keep using cards. No forced migration, no disruption to current subscribers.
The savings are larger than they appear. Processing fees drop from 2.9% + $0.30 to ~1-1.5%, but that is the smaller number. The bigger one is the involuntary churn you no longer lose. A stablecoin customer who would have churned involuntarily in month 8 now pays for months 9 through 36 and beyond. The expected LTV recovery per customer dwarfs the processing savings. That means you can offer 5-10% off for stablecoin payment and still come out well ahead on a per-customer basis. The discount is funded by revenue you were previously losing to expired cards.
The stablecoin cohort has zero involuntary churn from day one. No expired credentials, no decline codes, no retry windows. Over 12-24 months, the retention gap between your stablecoin and card cohorts becomes visible in the data. The blended metrics improve with every customer that switches.
The critical point: this is additive, not replacement. Card payments continue to work exactly as they do today. Stablecoin is a second rail that runs in parallel. Adoption is gradual, voluntary, and incentive-driven. There is no migration event. There is no switchover date. The economics do the work.
Invest. Migrate. Re-rate.
AI is repricing SaaS — not killing it. New delivery models and new pricing require new payment infrastructure. That's the core thesis at Inversion. The SaaS companies that make this transition will be the winners of the next decade.
At current multiples, the re-rating from 5x to 7.5-8.5x contributes more enterprise value than the EBITDA improvement itself. That asymmetry is the entire thesis.
Quantify the infrastructure cost for your business.
Five inputs. The calculator shows what payment-caused churn is costing you in lost revenue, compressed LTV, and suppressed margins.
AI is repricing SaaS — not killing it.
New delivery models and new pricing require new payment infrastructure. That's the core thesis at Inversion. The SaaS companies that make this transition will be the winners of the next decade.
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