SaaS AI Price Increases 2026: The AI Tax Tracker

The renewal email usually reads the same way. The price is going up, and the reason is a paragraph about AI features you did not ask for. Slack put it plainly in June 2025: Business+ would rise from $12.50 to $15 per user per month "to reflect the significant value added through new advanced AI capabilities".

Finance teams call it the AI tax. I wanted the list in one place, so this page logs every list-price increase on an existing software plan where the vendor itself tied the rise to AI, with the old and new price, the date it took effect and the source. It does not count new AI add-ons; those are a separate purchase you can decline.

Announced, not yet in effect

Increases with an effective date still ahead. These move into the main table's past once the date passes.

• 13 October 2026: Atlassian Confluence Cloud Premium, $13.20 to $14.10 per user per month, monthly billing, 1-100 user tier (+6.8%), citing Platform and AI capabilities: Teamwork Graph, agents in Jira, AI-native content creation in Confluence.
• 13 October 2026: Atlassian Confluence Cloud Standard, $6.70 to $7.15 per user per month, monthly billing, 1-100 user tier (+6.7%), citing Platform and AI capabilities: Teamwork Graph, agents in Jira, AI-native content creation in Confluence.
• 13 October 2026: Atlassian Jira Cloud Premium, $18.30 to $19.60 per user per month, monthly billing, 1-100 user tier (+7.1%), citing Platform and AI capabilities: Teamwork Graph, agents in Jira, AI-native content creation in Confluence.
• 13 October 2026: Atlassian Jira Cloud Standard, $9.05 to $9.70 per user per month, monthly billing, 1-100 user tier (+7.2%), citing Platform and AI capabilities: Teamwork Graph, agents in Jira, AI-native content creation in Confluence.

Every AI-linked price increase

One row per plan, newest effective date first. "Change" is the percentage rise in the list price in the unit shown; where a vendor announced several plans at once, each plan has its own row.

45 increases, newest effective date first. List prices as the vendor or the cited publication stated them; regional prices differ.

What the increases have in common

Four patterns hold across the table. Each is a reading of dated rows, so check the rows before you quote the reading.

The AI add-on disappears and every seat pays for it

Google retired its Gemini add-ons and folded Gemini into Workspace, moving Business Standard from $12 to $14 per user per month for existing customers from 17 March 2025. Notion did the same with Notion AI on 13 May 2025, taking Business from $15 to $20 per seat. Slack retired its Slack AI add-on when Business+ went to $15.

The arithmetic favours the vendor. An add-on bought by a fifth of the seats becomes a price rise paid by all of them, and nobody can decline it at renewal.

Microsoft raised prices with AI in the announcement five times

Dynamics 365 in October 2024, consumer Microsoft 365 in Australia in October 2024 and in the US in January 2025, Power BI in April 2025, and the commercial Microsoft 365 suites from 1 July 2026. That is why Microsoft holds 17 of the 45 rows and why the page also reports a median that counts each vendor once.

In most of these announcements AI was one reason among several. The 2026 commercial increase also cited security and device management, and Microsoft said the consumer rise reflected twelve years of added value. The rows record what the vendor said, not a judgment about which reason mattered most.

Small rises, repeated every year

Atlassian raised Jira and Confluence Cloud prices on 15 October 2025 and has announced another round for 13 October 2026, both under 12% per plan and both justified by a year of improvements that include Rovo and AI features. Intuit raised QuickBooks Online in July 2025 and again in August 2026, citing its AI agents. A single 7% rise is easy to approve. Two in a row compound to about 14.5%.

Canva is the outlier

In September 2024 some US customers on Canva's legacy Teams plan saw their price go from about $120 a year for up to five people to $500, with a 40% discount for the first year. The 316.7% rise is the largest in the table by a factor of six, and Canva tied it to its Magic Studio AI tools.

What to check before your renewal

Check the effective date against your renewal date first. Most of these increases apply at renewal for existing customers, which gives you a known window to negotiate or switch plans.

Then look for a plan without the AI bundle. Microsoft kept Classic Personal and Family plans without Copilot at the old price, and Adobe sells Creative Cloud Standard with reduced AI features at $54.99 a month next to the $69.99 Pro plan. Existing Adobe Photography plan members could keep $9.99 a month by switching to prepaid annual billing.

If the AI you are paying for is meant to do work rather than assist, compare it with what dedicated agent products charge. The AI agent pricing change log tracks those prices, the AI agent pricing index lists today's floors and the cheapest AI agent platforms ranks them.

Update log

What moved on this page, by date. Corrections are logged here rather than edited in silently.

1. 4 October 2026: Tracker launched with 45 verified increases from 9 vendors, each with a source.

Methodology

What counts. A list-price increase on an existing software subscription plan, effective on or after 1 January 2024, where the vendor's own announcement, pricing page, help centre, blog or customer email (as quoted by credible press) names AI features, an AI assistant or AI agents as a reason for the rise or as what the new price includes. Announced future increases count, marked with their effective date.

What does not count. A new paid AI add-on with no change to an existing price, promotional prices expiring, currency or tax adjustments, increases that only commentators link to AI, consumer media subscriptions and model API token prices.

Prices. The headline list price the vendor or the cited publication quotes, in the unit stated in the row (usually per user per month on annual billing). Where no announcement printed both figures, the old and new prices come from the vendor's own pricing page as archived by the Wayback Machine, and the row's sources say so. The percentage is (new minus old) divided by old, shown to one decimal, and only when both prices share a unit and currency.

Strength of the AI tie. For some rows AI is the headline reason (Slack, Google Workspace, Notion); for others it is one of several (Dynamics 365, Power BI, the 2026 Microsoft 365 suites, Salesforce). The notes column in the CSV records which.

Cadence. A weekly job pulls news candidates from the GDELT news index, checks each against the vendor's own announcement, and appends verified rows; the page is rebuilt from that stored data. Gaps: vendors that raise prices by customer email only (monday.com, Asana, Zoom, HubSpot and Dropbox were checked and did not have a vendor source I could cite) are missing until a primary source appears.

FAQ

Sources

More on what AI costs: AI agent pricing trends in 2026, how much an AI employee costs and the AI agent funding tracker. Our own plans are on the pricing page.