Zuora This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. The subscription pricing model is fading out, and usage pricing is the "next wave," execs say. The model better aligns companies and their customers, execs from Twilio, Snowflake, and Zuora say. But there are risks, including fluctuating revenue and overdependence on demand. The shift away from buying boxed software toward subscriptions was one of the biggest innovations of the cloud era to date, but there's a new model that's winning converts and disrupting the status quo. Usage-based pricing has been gaining steam. In the structure, companies charge customers based on their precise usage, like their per-second compute power consumption or their amount of storage.