The first wave of B2B data products looked a lot like utilities. You bought a certain number of records, exported them to your CRM, and started dialing or blasting emails. Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo, Apollo, and others turned this into a system of credits, exports, and metered plans. The more you wanted, the more you paid.
That model made sense when the end user was human. A salesperson could work through a few hundred names in a week. A marketing team might upload ten thousand records into a campaign. Metering was manageable because the consumption pace was slow.
But the world has changed. AI has entered the go-to-market stack, and AI doesn’t consume data like a human does. AI consumes data continuously, automatically, and at scale. Which means the old metered model breaks.
Think back to the days of dial-up internet. You’d connect, load a few web pages, then disconnect because every minute cost money. The whole experience was constrained by usage. Developers couldn’t build rich applications because the pipes were too thin and too expensive.
Broadband changed everything. Suddenly, usage wasn’t capped by minutes. The connection was always on. That shift made streaming video, real-time chat, cloud software, and mobile apps possible. An unmetered foundation unlocked entire industries.
The same shift is now happening in B2B data. Metered access to a catalog is dial-up. An unmetered core is broadband. And AI won’t work without broadband.
There are three reasons AI requires unmetered access to core data.
1. AI consumes continuously
An AI workflow doesn’t stop after pulling 500 records. It may need to analyze every company in a market, filter thousands of job titles, or run verification checks in real time. Cutting it off after a set number of queries isn’t just inconvenient. It breaks the workflow entirely.
2. AI needs context, not slices
Human reps might want a narrow slice of a dataset, like “all VPs of Marketing in California.” An AI agent wants the whole universe. It needs to see every company, every contact, every field to decide what matters. If you only let it peek at slices, it can’t reason properly.
3. AI builds on repetition
AI models often rerun queries, cross-check results, and repeat processes to ensure accuracy. In a metered world, this looks like “waste.” In reality, it’s part of how the system learns. Metering penalizes the very behavior that makes AI reliable.
The incumbents built their businesses on metering. The B2B data industry charges per export using credit-based systems. Their pricing models assume consumption is human-scale and predictable.
But AI breaks that assumption. An AI pipeline might need to process millions of records in one run. It might need to enrich every new lead flowing into a system in real time. These aren’t human workflows; they’re machine workflows. And they don’t fit into a credit-based model.
That’s why list vendors can’t make the leap. Their economic model depends on rationing access. The more customers consume, the more they pay. AI demands the opposite: unrestricted access so it can reason freely.
So what does an unmetered core look like?
1. Always on
Customers get a feed of all companies and contacts, continuously updated. No need to request slices. The core is there, accessible at any time.
2. Unlimited queries
Your AI agents can ask as many questions as they need. The economic model isn’t tied to queries or exports. It’s tied to the value of accuracy and freshness.
3. Integrated delivery
The data flows directly into customer systems — Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, or other environments — so AI can work on it without interruption.
4. Continuous refresh
The core isn’t static. Every record is verified, refreshed, and completely re-verified from trusted sources at least once every 90 days, with most records being re-verified monthly. The feed is alive, not frozen.
This looks less like “buying a list” and more like subscribing to a data utility. Like broadband, the value isn’t in rationing consumption. It’s in guaranteeing access and reliability.
Let’s take a simple example. Imagine a revenue operations team building an AI pipeline to identify expansion opportunities in their customer base. The AI needs to know:
If the AI only has access to a metered slice of data, it can’t answer these questions fully. It may miss a critical hiring signal. It may overlook a contact who moved. It may filter out relevant companies because the data was rationed.
With an unmetered core, the AI can run every filter, check every contact, and surface opportunities with confidence. The workflow runs without hitting a wall. That’s the difference between dial-up and broadband.
RevenueBase is built on the unmetered core model. Every customer gets continuous access to the full company and contact universe. There are no per-export limits, no credit throttles, no query caps. AI agents can query as freely as they need.
This design isn’t an accident. It’s recognition that AI needs a different kind of data infrastructure. Just as SaaS broke the license model of on-prem software, the AI paradigm breaks the credit model of list vendors.
RevenueBase aligns its value to accuracy and freshness, not to rationed consumption. Customers pay for truth, not for the right to make another query.
The implications go beyond data vendors. Entire categories of B2B martech will need to rethink how they integrate with AI.
The companies that adapt to unmetered, continuous access will thrive. The ones that cling to metering will look like dial-up ISPs in the broadband era.
The AI paradigm makes one thing clear: unmetered access is the foundation. Without it, your AI workflows can’t run. With it, new categories of applications become possible.
That’s why RevenueBase has made the unmetered core central to its model. It isn’t a pricing gimmick. It’s a design choice for the AI future.
In the coming years, customers won’t ask “How many credits do I get?” They’ll ask “How accurate and fresh is the feed?” That’s the only question that matters when AI is the one consuming the data.
The companies that understand this shift will define the next decade of B2B data. The ones that don’t will be left behind with their metered exports and static lists.
The dial-up era is ending. Broadband is here. AI is the reason.
