The Invisible Curve: When AI Subscriptions Stop Adding Up

3–4 minutos

abril 22, 2026

Agentes IA, Dynamics365, Inteligencia Artificial

Busy stretch this week. Anthropic, GitHub and SAP all moved within days of each other, and the signal isn’t random: the flat-rate AI subscription model that carried us through the last couple of years is starting to break. Not for users — for the vendors themselves.

Three moves, one signal

On April 3, 2026, Anthropic announced it would stop covering third-party tools through Claude Pro/Max subscriptions, effective April 4. On April 19, GitHub published its changes to Copilot Individual, with the associated changelog the day after: new sign-ups paused for Pro, Pro+ and Student; tighter usage limits; and Opus models removed from Pro. Only Opus 4.7 remains in Pro+, with Opus 4.5 and 4.6 already flagged to leave Pro+ as well.

Meanwhile, in a very different context, SAP CEO Christian Klein told Bloomberg in March 2026 that the company wants to move away from traditional per-user subscriptions toward consumption-based AI pricing, because agents automate work and break the «pay per user» logic. These aren’t isolated moves or reactive patches. It’s a shift in the business model.

Why flat-rate subscriptions stop adding up

The common signal across Anthropic, GitHub and SAP is the same: once a model or agent starts executing heavy work, vendors pull the «unlimited usage» out of the subscription and push it toward metered consumption or higher-tier plans.

The stated reasons are familiar: agentic usage growth is outpacing every compute forecast, and there isn’t enough pie to go around. So access gets restricted — lost features, price hikes, tighter caps. This will be the tone of the rest of 2026.

The new floor: from $20 to $100-200 a month

A free tier is already completely insufficient. But the $20/month tier is also becoming unprofitable for vendors, and I think it’ll follow the same path: fewer frontier models, tighter limits, trimmed capabilities.

That means the $100 or $200 a month tiers will carry the real capabilities — and therefore the real productivity gains. GitHub Copilot, with its request-based model, is clearly signaling that either the economics don’t work or the capacity isn’t there to meet demand. So it’s pushing models and services up the price ladder: segment to serve everyone, or at least to serve someone predictably.

The invisible curve: from technical cost to strategic cost

In 2026 we’ll all have to figure out how this fits into our personal and company balance sheets. And more importantly, we need to be aware of the invisible curve: the moment when this cost stops being a technical line item and becomes a strategic one.

When will we see it clearly? My bet: we’ll start seeing — as already happens in some countries — that paying for a mid-to-high-tier AI subscription will become a salary benefit, sitting right next to health insurance and other retention perks.

The visible curve is the investment in good subscriptions. The invisible curve is the talent you can’t attract because your salary package doesn’t include AI. Give it time.

What about Business Central?

Will this reach Business Central? BC is resilient thanks to how it’s encapsulated, and everything arrives there a bit later. But it will arrive. The Copilot pieces inside BC, the agent integrations, the consumption of AI capabilities — someone has to absorb that cost. And the vendors are already showing their cards.

References 📚

Closing 🟦

What worries me isn’t the price. It’s the speed at which the ground is shifting. In six months we’ve gone from «creative all-you-can-eat» to «metered consumption,» and we’ve barely discussed it. Time to revisit plans, prioritize tools and start thinking of AI not as another line in the software bill, but as part of the package that attracts — or keeps — talent. In the meantime, here’s one of the three daily images I can still generate on ChatGPT’s free tier with its new model 😉