The numbers vendors do not put in the pitch deck. SBI Growth’s 2026 State of SaaS Pricing Report found that 58 percent of the software market still bundles AI features into core plans at no extra charge, which leaves the other 42 percent charging for it separately. The same report found something less comfortable for the bundlers: companies that give AI away free miss their revenue targets twice as often as companies that charge for it. That gap is a big part of why the AI surcharge everyone complains about showed up this year. It reads less like a cash grab and more like a correction the market was forcing on the holdouts.
Buyers felt it first as a renewal shock, not a line item. Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index puts numbers on that shock: 79 percent of IT leaders saw price increases at renewal in the past 12 months, and total SaaS spend rose nearly 8 percent even though the number of applications in the typical portfolio barely moved. Seventy eight percent ran into unexpected charges tied to consumption or AI features sometime during the year, and 61 percent ended up cutting some other project or initiative to cover the overrun. Zylo’s own pricing tracking shows why the math is so hard to predict: Microsoft Copilot runs $27 to $43 per user a month depending on the bundle, Salesforce Agentforce has changed its pricing model three times since September 2024, first per conversation, then per action, then per user, and HubSpot and Zendesk both meter AI by the credit or the resolved conversation instead of the seat.
Vendors are not improvising this, they are building metering infrastructure on purpose. A survey of 230 B2B software and AI companies run by Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged newsletter with Metronome, fielded in April and May of 2026, found 29 percent of vendors now offer multiple pricing models specifically for AI features, up from 21 percent a year earlier, and 37 percent use a hybrid of subscription plus consumption charges. Twenty nine percent already bill in AI credits, another third plan to add credits within 6 to 12 months, and among companies over 50 million dollars in annual revenue, roughly one in two said they would introduce AI credits this year.
The friction is landing on finance teams, not just end users. The same survey found vendors’ own biggest complaint is not customer resistance to AI pricing, it is that expansion revenue still falls short, which may be why hybrid and consumption pricing keeps spreading even as those same vendors admit it is hard to explain to customers. For a buyer, the practical read is that an AI feature quoted as included at signing is rarely included at renewal. Budgeting for software now means asking vendors for a usage cap or an all in renewal price before the contract is signed, not after the invoice shows a number nobody modeled.
Sources referenced in reporting: SBI Growth, The State of SaaS Pricing 2026, Zylo, 2026 SaaS Pricing Trends and SaaS Management Index, Kyle Poyar, Growth Unhinged, The State of B2B Monetization in 2026.