There are six ways to price AI in a SaaS product: bundle it free, bundle it and raise the price, put it only in a higher tier, sell a paid add-on, include credits per seat with top-ups, or meter it separately. Light AI features usually belong in the bundle. Heavy, variable features such as agents need credits or usage pricing so power users don't erase your margin.
Key takeaways
- Most incumbents bundled AI into the seat and raised the price: Slack took Business+ from $12.50 to $15, and Notion moved AI buyers to its $20 Business plan.
- Credits per seat, pooled across the account, are the most common way to cap heavy AI use. Atlassian includes 25, 70 or 150 Rovo credits per user.
- Work out AI cost per user per month, including your top 5% of users. That number decides the model.
- Charge separately only for AI that does one specific, valuable job, like MYOB's A$25-a-month AI BAS add-on.
- When you raise prices for AI, tell customers every option. The ACCC sued Microsoft over how it handled exactly this.
In May 2025, Notion retired its $10-a-month AI add-on for new customers on its cheaper plans.
You might think that was a price cut. It wasn't.
Instead of selling AI as a $10 extra on top of the $10 Plus plan, Notion bundled AI into its $20 Business plan. Anyone who wanted AI now had a simple choice: upgrade a tier.
A month later, Slack did something similar. It added AI to every paid plan, retired its separate AI add-on, and raised Business+ from $12.50 to $15 per user per month.
Two of the best-known SaaS companies in the world looked at the same question ("how do we charge for AI?") and both landed on the same answer: don't sell AI. Use it to sell the plan.
That's one of six options you have. Let me walk you through all six, what each one costs you per user, and how to pick the right one for your product.
Prices checked 27 October 2026. They change often, so see the AI Pricing Index for the latest.
What Changes When You Add AI to a SaaS Product?
Your cost of goods sold.
Traditional SaaS runs on 75% to 80% gross margins, because serving one more user costs almost nothing. AI isn't like that. Every summary, answer and agent task has a real model cost.
SaaStr puts AI-native gross margins at 50% to 60%. ICONIQ found the average AI product ran at 45% in 2025, projected to reach 53% in 2026.
You don't have to fall that far if AI is a feature rather than your whole product. But you do need to know your number, because AI cost doesn't spread evenly. A few heavy users can cost more than everyone else combined. (Anthropic introduced weekly limits on its Claude plans in 2025 specifically to target the less than 5% of users running its coding tool around the clock.)
The Six Ways to Price AI in a SaaS Product
Option #1: Bundle it and absorb the cost
AI is just part of the product, at no extra charge.
This works for light features that cost cents per user. It's a retention play: the product gets better, customers stay. Xero, for example, bundles AI features like automatic reconciliation and document capture into its plans.
Option #2: Bundle it and raise the price
Same as above, but you use the new value to justify a price rise. Slack did this with Business+. Xero raises its Australian prices every 1 July while bundling more AI features into its plans: from 1 July 2026, Grow went from A$75 to A$78 and Comprehensive from A$100 to A$107.
Option #3: Put AI in a higher tier only
AI becomes the reason to upgrade. That's Notion's move. It works when AI is your strongest upgrade reason and most AI demand comes from your bigger customers.
Option #4: Sell a paid add-on
A separate line item, usually per user. MYOB bundles general AI features like Ask Iris, but sells AI BAS as a paid add-on at A$25 a month. Zendesk sells Copilot at $50 per agent per month (annual). Fin sells Copilot for its helpdesk at $29 per agent per month (annual). Zoom sells a Custom AI Companion add-on at $12.
Add-ons work for AI that does one specific, valuable job. They work badly for general AI sprinkled across the product, because customers resent paying extra for something that feels like it should be included.
Option #5: Include credits per seat, sell top-ups
Every seat comes with a monthly AI allowance. Use more, buy more. Atlassian includes 25, 70 or 150 Rovo credits per user per month, depending on the plan, and pools them across everyone on the site. Figma gives each seat AI credits and sells add-on packs (5,000 credits for $150 pay-as-you-go or $120 a month on subscription). HubSpot includes 500, 3,000 or 5,000 credits a month by edition, then charges $10 per 1,000.
This is the most common answer in 2026, and I cover the mechanics in the guide to credit-based pricing.
Option #6: Meter it separately
The AI has its own usage price, on top of the seat. Zendesk charges $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution beyond the 5 to 10 included per agent. HubSpot charges $0.50 per resolved conversation for its Customer Agent. This is really a hybrid pricing model, and it fits AI that does work your customer would otherwise pay a person to do.
AI SaaS Pricing Compared: What the Big Players Charge
| Company | What they did | Price point (Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Bundled AI, raised price | Business+ $15/user/month annual (was $12.50) |
| Notion | Moved AI into higher tier | Business $20/user/month annual; AI add-on retired for new Free/Plus customers |
| Atlassian | Credits per seat, pooled | 25 / 70 / 150 Rovo credits per user per month; a basic chat message uses 10 |
| Figma | Credits per seat + add-on packs | 5,000 extra credits for $150 (PAYG) or $120/month |
| HubSpot | Shared credit pool + agent meter | $10 per 1,000 credits; $0.50 per resolved conversation |
| Zendesk | Seat + add-on + outcome meter | Copilot $50/agent; $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution |
| Microsoft | Per-seat add-on and suite bundle | Copilot Business $21 ($18 promo); Microsoft 365 E7 $99 |
| Xero (AU) | Bundled AI, annual price rises | Grow A$78/month; Comprehensive A$107 |
| MYOB (AU) | General AI bundled, one AI add-on | AI BAS A$25/month |
Prices checked 27 October 2026; they change often. See the AI Pricing Index.
Worked Example: What Does AI Cost You per User?
Let's say you sell project software at $30 per user per month with an 80% gross margin. You add an AI assistant. What happens?
Light users, heavy users and the blended cost
Assumptions (illustrative): each AI request sends about 3,000 input tokens and returns 500 output tokens on Claude Sonnet 5.5 ($2 in / $10 out per million tokens).
Cost per request: (3,000 × $2 + 500 × $10) ÷ 1,000,000 = $0.011
Light user (95% of users): 60 requests a month = $0.66 Heavy user (5% of users): 1,500 requests a month = $16.50
Blended cost per user: (0.95 × $0.66) + (0.05 × $16.50) = $1.45
On a $30 seat, that's 4.8% of revenue. Your gross margin drops from 80% to about 75%. Manageable.
Now add an agent feature where each task runs 40 model calls of 30,000 input and 2,000 output tokens on Claude Opus 5.5 ($4 / $20). That's (1.2M × $4 + 80,000 × $20) ÷ 1,000,000 = $6.40 per task. Ten tasks a month costs $64, more than twice the seat price.
That example tells you most of what you need to know.
The assistant can be bundled. The agent can't. The agent needs credits, a separate meter, or a much smaller model. The same agent task on Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.10 in / $0.50 out) costs about $0.16, if the cheaper model is good enough for the job.
Run your own version in the AI Gross Margin Calculator, and read the deeper guide to AI gross margins.
Credit Pack DesignerTurn your cost per action into a credit rate card with healthy margins.Open the free tool →See what AI does to your gross margin
Model token costs, light and heavy users and your new gross margin with the free AI Gross Margin Calculator.
Which Option Should You Choose?
Here's my rule of thumb, based on the blended AI cost per user as a share of your seat price:
| Blended AI cost per user | Cost varies a lot between users? | Choose |
|---|---|---|
| Under about 5% of price | No | Option 1 or 2: bundle it, and use it to justify your next price rise |
| 5% to 15% of price | Somewhat | Option 3 or 5: higher tier, or included credits with a fair-use cap |
| Over 15%, or a few users cost 10x+ the average | Yes | Option 5 or 6: credits with top-ups, or a separate usage meter |
| Any | AI does one specific paid job | Option 4: a focused add-on |
Two questions break the tie.
Is AI your best upgrade reason? Then follow Notion and put it in the next tier up.
Does the AI replace work customers pay people to do? Then follow Zendesk and HubSpot and meter the work, because that's where the value is.
Back in Chapter Three of The Subscription Playbook, I said the two things I could tell you for certain about pricing were to move customers toward subscription and to keep it low friction. AI pricing tests the second one hard. Every new credit type, multiplier and add-on is friction. So if you can bundle, bundle. Meter only what you must.
How Do You Raise Prices for AI Without a Backlash?
Plenty of companies have used AI to raise prices. Not all of them did it well.
Canva raised some long-standing Teams customers by more than 300% in 2024, pointing to its Magic Studio AI tools, and softened it with a discounted first year. It kept growing. But in 2026 it raised US Pro from $144 to $180, reverted to $144 six weeks later, then cut the free AI allowance from 200 uses to 20. That kind of whiplash costs trust. (The full story is in the Canva case study.)
Figma gave every seat AI credits, let habits form, then enforced the limits from 18 March 2026. A community thread soon appeared titled "Figma Make AI credit limits not feasible".
The lessons are simple:
- Make the value visible on day one. If customers can't point to what they got, they'll call it a price rise for nothing.
- Warn before you enforce. Show usage dashboards for a month or two before limits bite.
- Grandfather or phase. Cursor, Windsurf and Clay all let existing customers keep old plans for a while.
- Protect your entry price so new customers aren't scared off.
- Listen hard. At my previous software company, we created a weekly "Voice of the Customer" meeting where the customer success team walks every department through why customers left. If you change AI pricing, that meeting is where you'll hear the truth first.
Model the impact before you announce it with the Price Increase Simulator, and read the guide on how to raise prices.
An Australian Warning: The Microsoft Copilot Case
In January 2025, Microsoft added Copilot to consumer Microsoft 365 plans and raised prices. In Australia, Personal went from A$109 to A$159 a year and Family from A$139 to A$179.
On 27 October 2025, the ACCC sued Microsoft in the Federal Court. It alleges Microsoft told about 2.7 million auto-renewing subscribers they could accept Copilot at the higher price or cancel, without clearly telling them about a third option: a "Classic" plan without Copilot at the old price (ACCC media release). These are allegations, not findings. Check the ACCC website for the case's current status.
The lesson isn't "don't bundle AI and raise prices". That's legitimate. The lesson is: if a cheaper option exists, tell auto-renewing customers about it, give notice well before renewal, and make the choice clear. I go through the details in raising subscription prices in Australia, and you can read the full Microsoft case study.
This is general information, not legal advice.
Free Subscription Profit Review
Australian business owners can book a free 30-minute review with a BPAG Accountants adviser. An honest conversation about:
- whether a subscription model could work for your business
- how recurring revenue could cover your fixed costs each month
- how it could lift what your business is worth
No cost, no obligation. General information only until we understand your situation.
What to Do Next
- List every AI feature you have or plan, and estimate requests per user per month for light and heavy users.
- Price the tokens for each feature on your current model and one cheaper model with the AI Token Cost Calculator.
- Work out blended cost per user and your new gross margin.
- Choose an option per feature using the table above. Most products end up with two: bundle the light features, put credits on the heavy ones.
- If you use credits, design the allowance and top-up prices with the Credit Pack Designer.
- Plan the announcement: value first, notice period, grandfathering, and every option spelled out.
Then check how the rest of your tiers fit together in the guide to packaging. If your AI feature is really an agent, read AI agent pricing next.
Frequently asked questions
Should AI features be free for existing customers?
Light features that cost you cents per user, such as summaries or smart suggestions, are usually best included, because they reduce churn and support a future price rise. Expensive features like agents shouldn't be free and unlimited. Include a monthly allowance and sell more, which is what Atlassian, Figma and HubSpot do.
How much should I charge for an AI add-on?
Anchor it to the job, not the tokens. Real add-ons in October 2026 include Zoom's Custom AI Companion at $12 per user, Fin's Copilot at $29 per agent (annual), Zendesk's Copilot at $50 per agent and MYOB's AI BAS at A$25 a month. Check your cost per user is well below the price, including heavy users.
Should I pool AI credits across a team or give them per seat?
Pool them. Atlassian pools Rovo credits across all users and products on a site, so light users cover heavy ones and nobody hits a wall mid-task. HubSpot uses one shared pool too, but that means one hungry agent can drain credits meant for other features, so give admins limits per feature or per user.
Can I raise prices because I added AI?
Yes, if customers can see the new value on day one. Slack, Canva and Microsoft all did it, and Xero bundled AI into its plans as it raised them. Give proper notice, phase big rises, keep your entry plan stable and, in Australia, make sure auto-renewing customers know every option available, including any cheaper plan you still offer.
What happens to my SaaS valuation if AI lowers my gross margin?
Buyers and investors look closely at gross margin, so a fall from 80% to 70% can matter. Xero's gross margin fell from 89% to 83.9% while revenue grew 31%, and investors noticed. Price AI so its cost sits inside the price, and track gross margin with and without AI.
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Robert Coorey, MBA
Robert is the author of The Subscription Playbook and Feed a Starving Crowd and a Director at BPAG Accountants in Sydney. More about Robert.
Sources
- Slack, June 2025 pricing and packaging announcement
- Notion pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Atlassian Support, Rovo usage limits (2026)
- Figma blog, Updates to AI credits in Figma (2026)
- MYOB pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- Xero AU pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- ACCC, Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading millions of Australians (27 Oct 2025)
- Anthropic API pricing (checked 27 Oct 2026)
- SaaStr summary of ICONIQ 2026 State of AI (10 Jul 2026)
Facts and prices checked 27 October 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.