Software's $2 Trillion Round Trip: Consumption-Priced Vendors Are Winning the 2026 Stock Recovery

SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin surveyed 2026’s public software-stock swings and landed on a specific claim: billing model, not growth rate, is what’s actually predicting stock performance this year. The software ETF (IGV) closed September 3 at $106.81, up roughly 40% from an April low of $74, after the sector collectively lost and then recovered close to $2 trillion in market cap — with a 117-point spread between the year’s best and worst performers.

The winners are consumption- and security-priced: CrowdStrike (+83.4% YTD, $5.84B ARR up 25%, Falcon Flex ARR $2.29B up 101%), Twilio (+73.8%, Q2 revenue $1.50B), Snowflake (+73.1%, Q2 product revenue $1.49B up 37%, guidance raised to $6.07B), and Datadog (+53.9%, Q2 revenue up 35.6%, 750+ AI customers including the top 10 AI companies). Seat-priced platforms lagged even with real growth underneath them: HubSpot (-33.3%, net adds fell to 7,000 versus 9,000-10,000 expected), monday.com (-35.5%, despite AI ARR doubling to 17% of net new ARR), and Figma (-35.1%, despite 48% growth and 136% net revenue retention, on soft Q3 guidance). Salesforce round-tripped from $146 in June to $264.43 by September 3, disclosing $1.5B in Agentforce ARR; on the private side, Airtable — a $12B valuation in 2021 — sold to Bending Spoons for under $1.3B.

Lemkin’s thesis is that agent deployment generates more logs, data, and attack surface to defend, which structurally favors usage-based and security vendors over per-seat ones — a mechanism that lines up with what a16z found in a July analysis of the same sell-off: essentially no correlation between revenue growth and recent stock performance, with the market instead pricing in perceived long-term durability against AI disruption, multiples on next-twelve-months free cash flow sitting at or below 2014 levels.

For anyone selling into or benchmarking against these companies, the pricing-model split is now a genuine leading indicator of investor confidence — a seat-priced vendor posting strong growth is being valued as if the growth itself is in question.