OpenView: by 2025's end, 79 of 500 tracked software companies, like HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce, adopted usage-based AI fees, more than double that of 2024
Dozens of enterprise software firms have shifted away from charging customers flat, per-user subscription fees as AI threatens their seat-based pricing model.
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier coverage showed enterprise-software vendors struggling to capture much of the initial AI spending, while infrastructure and cloud absorbed more of it. The reported adoption of usage-based AI fees by HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce, and dozens of peers is a move to connect software revenue more directly to AI consumption.
The surrounding coverage also shows buyers confronting rapidly rising AI bills and adding controls or seeking cheaper models. That makes the pricing shift consequential for both vendors’ unit economics and customers’ procurement behavior.
First-order effects
- HubSpot, Adobe, Salesforce, and other adopters can charge for AI activity separately from per-user subscriptions, reducing the mismatch between recurring seat revenue and variable AI-serving costs.
- Customers face AI spend that varies with consumption rather than being fully bundled into license fees, increasing the need to measure and govern usage.
Second-order effects
- Software buyers are likely to compare AI features on cost per useful task and impose budgets or limits where usage charges rise quickly; vendors must make the value and metering of those features legible.
- Usage pricing puts greater pressure on model and infrastructure costs: as customers seek cheaper ways to deliver similar work, application vendors have incentives to optimize model selection and AI workloads.
Third-order effects
- If adoption continues, enterprise-software pricing could become more hybrid: seats for access and workflow, with metered charges for compute-intensive AI actions. That would make AI unit economics a more central product and sales discipline.
- The shift may also move AI procurement from broad feature adoption toward controlled, measurable deployment, with vendors competing on both outcomes and the cost of producing them.
The trend: Enterprise software is moving from seat-based monetization toward usage-linked AI pricing as variable inference costs and customer scrutiny make bundled pricing harder to sustain.