The New Reality: AI Makes SaaS More Powerful—and More Expensive
SaaS price increases are a wave of higher subscription fees and new usage-based pricing models introduced by software and AI vendors to pass growing AI infrastructure expenses, data costs, and staffing investments directly onto customers, often without a matching increase in perceived value or control for the buyers who fund these changes.
This is not a distant threat. A major research firm now warns customers to brace for bigger software bills as software and AI vendors raise prices and pile on usage charges. In the last six months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have already shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing, prompting cost concerns among users. That is the leading edge of a broader trend: generative AI is expensive to run, and vendors are done subsidizing it out of their own margins.
The uncomfortable truth: if your team wants modern AI-enabled tools, your budget will pay for the infrastructure that powers them. Pretending otherwise is how you end up surprised when renewal emails arrive.
Why Vendors Are Passing AI Infrastructure Expenses to You
The root cause of rising software subscription costs is simple: AI infrastructure is a capital sink, and vendors are done swallowing it alone. The build cost for AI datacenters is estimated to hit USD 2 trillion (approx. RM9.2 trillion) by 2030. Someone has to fund that. Vendors are choosing the obvious candidate: their customers.
According to one major survey of more than 2,600 business and technology decision-makers, software budgets are expected to rise as vendors increase prices or add usage charges to pass their AI costs to customers. That is a quotable warning, because it signals intent: this is not a one-off spike; it is a structural shift.
On top of that, personnel costs are not falling. Staffing accounted for 35 percent of IT budgets in 2025, and 67 percent of tech decision-makers expect staffing budgets to increase by 2027, with only 10 percent expecting a decline. Vendors are paying for data, models, and people—and they see your SaaS line items as the easiest place to recover those costs.
Squarespace’s 26% Hike: A Warning Shot for Every SaaS Customer
If you want a practical example of how this plays out, look at Squarespace. Users report emails detailing price increases as high as 26 percent, depending on plan and payment option. On the popular annual Core plan, the price is increasing from the equivalent of USD 23 (approx. RM106) to USD 29 (approx. RM134) per month, a 26 percent hike.
For creators and small businesses, that is not an abstract budget line. Photographers, designers, and other visual artists are loudly debating alternatives, asking peers where to move their sites and whether any platform still feels worth the cost. One user reaction sums it up: they had a “basic ass landing page” and now feel pushed to pay for AI tools they never asked for.
What is definitely true for most users is that they will be paying more, all else equal, at a time when that is about the last thing anyone wants to do. Treat Squarespace not as an outlier, but as an early signal of what many SaaS vendors will attempt once they think their customer base is locked in.
Usage-Based Pricing: Flexibility for Vendors, Volatility for You
The shift from flat subscriptions to usage-based pricing sounds fair on paper—pay for what you use—but in practice it moves risk from vendors to customers. In the last six months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing, and that change alone has already prompted cost concerns among users.
Token-based and usage-driven AI costs are unpredictable by design. A research firm bluntly notes that traditional FinOps was not built for this kind of billing, yet that team is best positioned to build new capabilities and must make this leap in 2027. The recommendation is to fund runtime cost controls such as model routing, semantic caching, and usage guardrails to prevent runaway spend.
If you do not put guardrails around usage-based pricing, your finance team will be budgeting with a blindfold. Vendors will enjoy smooth recurring revenue; you will live with fluctuating invoices and awkward executive reviews when the “AI pilot” blows past its forecast.
How Software Teams Should Respond Before the Bills Spike
You cannot stop SaaS price increases, but you can decide whether your budget is deliberate or accidental. The first step is to stop treating SaaS as background noise and start treating it as a strategic spend category. That means auditing every subscription, every seat, and every AI add-on before renewal season hits.
The same research firm advising on AI costs recommends that organizations adapt their FinOps practices to manage unpredictable AI-related spend. In practical terms, that means aligning finance, engineering, and procurement around usage-based pricing, setting hard usage guardrails, and funding the tools and people needed to monitor runtime costs.
Finally, negotiate before vendors announce their next increase. Lock in term lengths, cap annual uplifts, and push to separate AI extras from core licenses so you can say no to features you do not value. The organizations that outperform will not be the ones that spend the most on AI—they will be the ones that decide, line by line, which software is worth a higher bill and which tools can be cut without regret.
