AI Inference Costs Are Crushing SaaS Gross Margins — Here's What to Do About It

Episode notes

Is your AI SaaS company skating on thin ice because of exploding compute costs you're not tracking? In episode #365, Ben Murray tackles one of the most pressing financial challenges facing AI-first SaaS companies: the structural margin compression caused by LLM inference costs. Traditional SaaS was built on near-zero marginal cost per customer — that era is over. If you're building on top of AI, every prompt, query, and agentic workflow is a hard COGS line that scales with revenue, and if you're not managing it, it will quietly destroy your unit economics. Why AI-first SaaS companies are running 50–60% gross margins (vs. 70–80% for legacy SaaS) — and what Bessemer data shows about AI supernovas with margins as low as 25%.