The sticker holds, the meter moves: AI pricing slid off the plan card this week

Microsoft left every Copilot list price where it was — $32.00, $23.50 and $21.00/$18.00 — and changed what the license buys. The page now reads: "Everyday AI is included in your license. Advanced AI—work you hand off—is billed as you use it." ^[1] Cowork, Autopilot and advanced AI experiences in SharePoint arrived on the Business cards in the same capture, alongside LLM choice and pre-built agents, while the 1 TB cloud storage and anytime phone/web support bullets came off Premium and Standard ^[22]. Microsoft's own documentation keeps the meter dark until an administrator turns it on ^[2].

Cohere shipped a new reranker and repriced the hosted tier downward. Our capture shows Model Vault's Rerank 4 Fast and Pro Medium rows renamed Rerank 5 and cut from $5.00/hr ($3,250/mo) to $4.00/hr ($2,500/mo), with Rerank 4 Pro Large at $10.00 and the Rerank 3.5 rows removed ^[23]. The page agrees: two Rerank rows remain, both Medium, and billing is still framed per search unit — "one query with up to 100 documents to be ranked" ^[7]. API rates are published separately at $0.05 per 1M tokens for Pro and $0.02 for Fast ^[6]; a practitioner tracker logged the same hosted line the day it appeared ^[10].

Composio launched Firewall and put it straight on the meter. The pricing page carries it as an add-on that "Uses decision models to check tool requests and results against your policies" ^[11] — unavailable on Hobby, usage-priced on Pro at $0.50 per 1M tokens evaluated, included on Enterprise, with a new FAQ separating Firewall billing from Sandbox LLM tokens ^[24]. A usage-pricing tracker logged the same launch ^[13]. Composio's own post describes what the product does, not what it costs ^[12], and a reviewer checking the day before found no published rate ^[14].

Dropzone AI replaced a capacity license with a bundle. Our capture shows the base plan dropping the 4,000-investigations-per-year-per-analyst cap on a single AI SOC Analyst product and replacing it with AI SOC Analyst, AI Threat Hunter and AI Threat Intel under one price ^[25]. The page carries "Unlimited investigations" on the card and, in the same breath, tells buyers "if you approach your investigation limit, Dropzone AI will notify you via email with a grace window" ^[15]. The cap moved off the plan card, not out of the contract.

Highlight AI cut the paid entry point and raised the allowance behind it. Lite at $35/mo became a Free plan at $0 forever, Pro fell from $60 to $35/month, Max held at $200, and Pro's credits went from 3,000 to 8,000/month with transcription from 50 to 200 hours — the allowance the old Max tier carried. Custom skills, previously Max-only, are now in Pro ^[26]. The page agrees: Free at $0, "For individuals who want to try Highlight on their own meetings and work" ^[18], and Pro at $35. We found no pricing entry in Highlight's changelog; the page is the announcement.

Only one of the five put a licensing argument behind the move, and it is the one that matters. Microsoft's page states the boundary rather than the feature list: "Everyday AI is included in your license. Advanced AI—work you hand off—is billed as you use it." ^[1] The seat buys the ambient assistant; anything handed off is metered. The documentation supplies the mechanics — "A Global Administrator or subscription owner can enable or disable Microsoft 365 pay-as-you-go features in the Microsoft 365 admin center" ^[2] — and trade accounting of Microsoft's own credit guide puts "pay-as-you-go credits at $0.01 each, with pre-purchase discounts of up to 20%" ^[4].

The rest framed price changes as product launches. Cohere led on quality and token economy and stated its API rates plainly ^[6]. Composio described Firewall's job and pointed at the pricing page for the number ^[12][11]. Dropzone made a packaging argument rather than a pricing one: "Coverage shouldn't depend on which function you could afford to fund first" ^[21] — which is how a removed cap gets presented as coverage rather than as a repriced unit. Highlight said nothing at all: no changelog entry, no post, just a changed page.

Coverage read Microsoft's split the way procurement will. Futurum: "Microsoft is pairing its per-user Copilot license with usage-based billing for agentic and frontier-model work" ^[3] — the familiar line item survives, the forecastable share of it shrinks. A practitioner blog was blunter about the consequence: "Any sensible IT management will set limits immediately to avoid an unexpectedly high bill" ^[5]. Cohere's repricing travelled well: trade coverage carried both API rates and described the cheaper tier as trading "a few points of accuracy for roughly three times the throughput" ^[8], while a second outlet led on Context Focus "cutting agent tokens by up to 41%" ^[9].

Everywhere else the web lags our capture, in two cases badly. Dropzone's withdrawn cap is still the public fact: a July vendor comparison states "The published list price was $36,000 a year for a single AI SOC analyst, capped at 4,000 investigations" ^[16], and a buyer guide still describes a base plan "which includes up to 4,000 AI-driven investigations annually per AI analyst" ^[17] — both selling a plan the page no longer offers. Highlight is further behind: a directory listing refreshed in September still carries the pre-change card while warning its own readers that "An older help article describes a Free tier, so verify the current offer before relying on it" ^[20], and a review from the spring still describes a freemium tool with a credit-limited paid tier ^[19]. Composio's rate was unpublished when a reviewer checked the day before it appeared ^[14]. For three of these five companies, the pricing page was the only place the change existed inside our window.

This was the heaviest AI-pricing week in the thirteen we track: 203 AI-relevant changes, against a prior high of 176 and a window median of 141 ^[27]. Of 314 tracked changes across 4,446 active pricing pages, 113 touched AI ^[28]. Volume alone is not the story; where the volume landed is.

The packaging mix explains why list prices barely moved. Bundling into existing tiers remains the default at 903 changes and 52% of the AI mix, but usage, credits and tokens account for 528 and 30%, new or restructured tiers 169 and 10%, and separate paid add-ons 149 and 9% ^[29]. The add-on share of AI moves rose to 8.05% from 6.03%, and both price-index baskets sat at 100 with 0 movers in either ^[30]. Microsoft, Composio and Dropzone all sit in that second column: the plan card held still and the charge moved underneath it. An index built on list prices cannot see a week like this one.

The theme counts point the same way. Credit language appears in 398 changes this window against 271 prior, across 204 companies, with 161 mentioning credits for the first time and 118 expanding an allowance against 57 shrinking one ^[31]: allowances are growing while the price of a credit mostly stays unstated. Agent language is up to 388 from 301 across 243 companies, but the metering is still vague — 368 unspecified, 17 per seat, 3 per outcome ^[32]. Free-AI moves nearly doubled, 155 against 87, with 44 expansions to 18 tightenings ^[33]; Highlight's $0 tier and Dropzone's unlimited card both belong in that column. Quantified moves still skew upward, 94 increases to 29 decreases with a median increase of 15.3% against a median decrease of 50% ^[34] — but the increases are getting harder to see, because fewer of them are in the list price.