AI Compute Could Force 80% of SaaS and AI Companies to Increase Prices

A new report from hy Consulting Group, OMR Reviews and Appinio says artificial intelligence is forcing software companies to rethink how they charge. The authors looked at 4,400 software profiles on OMR Reviews, surveyed 153 SaaS and AI companies, and interviewed 23 industry experts. Their message is blunt: the old SaaS habit of scaling without much extra cost is colliding with a world where every AI interaction burns compute, and money with it.

That shift is already hitting pricing plans. Four out of five companies in the survey are either planning or actively considering a pricing change within the next year. The report also suggests the market is rewarding companies that are built around AI from the start. In private funding rounds in the first quarter of 2026, legacy SaaS platforms sat at a median 5.5x revenue multiple, AI-enabled products reached 8.5x, and AI-native systems hit 21.2x. In other words, investors are paying up for architectures that were not merely patched with AI after the fact.

Billing itself is moving away from simple subscriptions. Right now, 40% of respondents still rely on subscriptions as their main model, but 34% already use hybrid pricing, 22% use licence or purchase models, and 4% use pure usage-based billing. Two years from now, 63% expect hybrid models to matter most for their business, while only 22% still see subscriptions on top. Pure usage pricing, for now, remains a minor bet.

The same pattern shows up in the metric customers are charged on. Per-user pricing is expected to lose 31 percentage points of importance, while outcome-based pricing gains 20, credits and tokens gain 14, API and consumption models gain 9, and workflow or task metrics gain 3. A quarter of respondents still have no target metric. For autonomous agents, the industry is even less settled: 31% bundle them into existing packages, 31% have no clear approach, and only 7% sell per agent. The cleanest lesson is that vendors are still trying to figure out whether they are selling software, work, or something uncomfortably close to a substitute for staff.

Discovery is becoming part of the pricing problem too. In the DACH region, 25% of software buyers already use AI systems for research, and 22% of vendors say AI chat interfaces are bringing them leads. Since 92% of B2B buyers end up choosing something from their initial shortlist, being visible inside AI systems matters as much as being on a website. Yet 93% of vendors still publish mainly on their own site, only 22% publish on review platforms, and none of the interviewed vendors has a dedicated AI visibility budget.