Consumption-based pricing models are driving costs 40% beyond budget, and catching out enterprise finance teams including at Uber and Microsoft
Vertice, the AI procurement platform built for the modern enterprise, has launched AI Cost Optimization in response to businesses’ inability to track, predict or control AI usage and spend.
Earlier this month, Uber admitted it had exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April, after usage among its 5,000-strong engineering team climbed from 32% to 84% in just one month. Meanwhile. Microsoft is urgently cancelling most of its non-GitHub AI licenses by 30 June 2026, after token-based billing made its costs unsustainable.
Accessible through Vertice’s award-winning intelligent procurement platform, AI Cost Optimization creates a unified view of spend, usage and commitments across all AI providers, with automated projections, pre-emptive alerts and intelligent cost control recommendations.
Vertice’s analysis of $75bn+ spend across 250k+ negotiated contracts – the largest global dataset of software pricing – has revealed that in just the last 12 months, the proportion of SaaS vendors offering seat-based pricing plans has plummeted from approximately half to a third – with the remaining two-thirds of all plans now either consumption-based or hybrid.
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Vertice’s analysis has also revealed that consumption-based pricing:
- Offers less negotiation leverage, resulting in 42% lower discounts versus seat-based models.
- Costs on average 37% more per user than seat-based pricing.
- Is 3X more likely to incur overage charges than seat-based models.
- Typically exceeds budgets by nearly 40%, versus just 5% for seat-based.
“Consumption-based pricing is a perfect storm for finance, procurement and IT teams. AI usage has driven demand to unprecedented levels, creating an AI arms race in every SaaS vertical. The economics of AI infrastructure have meant that pricing models have radically changed too. Which means as companies’ boards demand AI adoption and encourage experimentation, usage is skyrocketing – and so are costs.”
Eldar Tuvey, Founder and CEO, Vertice.
Vertice’s AI Cost Optimization tool has been designed to solve this exact problem for finance, procurement and IT teams.
- All AI usage and spend in a single dashboard, broken down by department, vendor and even individual AI models, showing the internal teams and applications consuming the most tokens and driving the highest spend.
- Granular usage views, showing token usage, requests and completed prompts.
- Budget utilization rates and 90-day usage and cost forecasts based on recent usage patterns.
- Usage versus commitment trackers for every vendor, with commitment thresholds extracted automatically from contracts.
- Cost optimization recommendations, based on the individual business’s usage patterns and needs, the contracts’ terms, and Vertice’s real-time dataset of 32,000+ SaaS vendors’ pricing data, commercial terms and negotiation intelligence.
- Customizable alerts to flag risk of upcoming threshold breaches, such as usage surges or commitment breaches.
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“Traditional cost optimization tools were designed to manage seat-based spend. But this doesn’t hold up when you are paying by the task or token, and your usage shifts every day. Our AI Cost Optimization not only helps teams control and predict their spend, but also creates an accurate usage precedent to inform future purchases, internal token allocations and usage policies.”
Eldar Tuvey, Founder and CEO, Vertice.
Vertice’s AI Cost Optimization tool is fully integrated within the Vertice Intake-to-Procure platform, from which renewals, contracts and approval workflows are also managed. This allows finance, procurement and IT teams to act immediately when usage is approaching a threshold, ranging from accessing the contracts’ terms and triggering a renegotiation workflow to reallocating usage.
“We are giving finance, procurement and IT teams the control they need. For years, buyers have lacked the pricing benchmarks and vendor intelligence to negotiate the best price and terms with vendors. To now add unpredictable AI pricing models on top just compounds the imbalance. Our AI Cost Optimization is the next step in Vertice’s mission to level the playing field.”
Eldar Tuvey, Founder and CEO, Vertice.
