Software Firms Discount AI to Keep Customers From Anthropic, OpenAI

Software firms and cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft, Figma and Workday are dangling new discounts on AI products to clients and consulting partners exhausted by shifts in pricing.

The special offers come as customers get choosier about which tools they purchase after they increased budgets for products like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex and cut other costs to justify the new spending. Businesses are also grumbling about shifts by software providers to charge them for AI based on usage or how many tasks it completes, which can drive up costs.

For instance, an executive of a global manufacturer with a market capitalization of more than $40 billion said Microsoft offered the company a “grace period” of at least a month to keep paying Microsoft a seat-based subscription fee for Github Copilot, a coding assistant, after Microsoft started charging customers based on how much people use the product. The pricing change means the manufacturer is due to pay Microsoft an additional $150,000 or so a month for employees’ use of the tool.

Microsoft also gave the company tens of thousands of dollars in free credits per month for three months after the usage-based pricing took effect. But because of the change, the executive said their team is considering shifting coding work to Anthropic’s Claude Code and SpaceX’s Cursor.

The new discounts show that traditional software providers, four years into the AI boom, are still figuring out how to compete with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI. The newcomers continue to improve their technology for automating work in numerous fields, including finance and design, and are each on pace to generate tens of billions of dollars this year. Complicating matters, OpenAI has been discounting its models, which put more pressure on traditional software providers.

And the traditional software providers themselves are paying Anthropic and OpenAI to power the new AI features they’re embedding in their enterprise apps, in hopes that customers won’t shift spending to the AI firms. But relying on such technology isn’t cheap, hence the recent pricing changes.

Some software firms like Snowflake are showing rising revenue growth from AI sales, while many others including Workday, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Adobe haven’t shown a notable acceleration.

‘Adoption, Adoption, Adoption’

Mike Trkay, chief information officer at credit scoring firm FICO, suggested his company is benefiting from efforts by many traditional software providers to keep accounts like his from shifting spending to Anthropic and OpenAI. Dozens of FICO’s software providers have offered new AI capabilities at no additional cost during contract renewals this year, he said, though he declined to name the providers. (FICO has more than 3,000 employees and uses providers including Salesforce, Oracle and Workday.)

“If a vendor doesn’t heavily discount or bundle it [AI capabilities] into their core license…it’s a contract we really wouldn’t sign anymore,” he said, because he doesn’t think the AI tools are worth the extra fee.

Workday, the human resources software provider, is one such firm offering incentives to select customers. The company said that this summer it launched a program offering unlimited, free access to its AI platform, Sana Enterprise, for one year to its top customers. About 20 large enterprises are participating in the program, which gives them AI agents to automate HR and finance tasks like onboarding new employees.

Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s president of technology, said during an earnings conference call in late August that “our focus is really on adoption, adoption, adoption.” He added: “How does this translate now to sales and dollars? Right now, it’s difficult to answer because this has not been our focus point.”

‘Being More Flexible’

Meanwhile, Figma CEO Dylan Field said this month at a Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco that the design-software provider recently cut the cost to use its AI products by as much as half. Following its switch to usage-based pricing in March, the company in late August said it would let users access more credits above what’s included in their subscriptions for the same cost. He said that the “primary objective” for Figma is “to drive volume” rather than commanding high margins on the AI tools such as Figma Make that it sells for automating design work.

Shayan Mohanty, chief data and AI officer of technology consulting firm Thoughtworks, said software firms have been more flexible on pricing in the past six months as they try to hold on to customers that are contending with pricier, usage-based AI. Software firms now typically offer 30% to 35% discounts on software and AI, and extend trial periods for new products. Previously, such discounts were typically below 20% and harder for Thoughtworks and its clients to secure, he said.

Dozens of FICO’s software providers have offered new AI capabilities at no additional cost during contract renewals this year, said Mike Trkay, its chief information officer.

As software firms change pricing, he said, “they’re being more flexible” with customers, he said.

One example is HubSpot. Yamini Rangan, CEO of the sales-software provider, has said that in April it began offering free trials for customers to test its AI agents for as long as 30 days, as it shifted to charge them when the agents completed tasks, in addition to subscription fees. That may not sound like much, but the change came at a cost to HubSpot as its revenue growth slowed during the June quarter.

Adobe Systems, meanwhile, offers customers basic versions of some of its AI products for free and charging them for advanced features. That’s helped drive up usage of Adobe Firefly, a suite of AI products for generating images and videos, the company said, but executives said in an earnings call this month that this “freemium” strategy is also weighing on the growth of Adobe’s revenue backlog growth and annual recurring revenue.

Microsoft and Amazon Too

It isn’t just traditional software firms that have caught the discounting bug. Large cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon are also sweetening pitches to customers to drive adoption of their AI products.

In addition to free credits and grace periods, Microsoft has gotten more generous with discounts of its Copilot AI software for enterprise customers in recent months, according to a Microsoft employee with direct knowledge of the change.

Microsoft sells subscriptions of Copilot for $30 per user per month, and companies recently began to pay extra depending on how much they use certain features, such as Copilot Cowork.

To sway customers to stay with Copilot, Microsoft in recent months started offering discounts of around 5% to 10% per seat to companies purchasing at least 2,000 seats. Previously, it only offered such discounts to huge customers such as KPMG or PwC that purchased hundreds of thousands of Copilot seats, this person said. The new discounts can save customers upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, this person said.

Amazon Web Services, which has long sought to sell software in addition to computing services, has offered consulting firm Rhythmic Technologies, which helps companies use AWS, around four months free of the most expensive tier of Kiro, an AI coding assistant, according to co-founder Cris Daniluk. He said he did not take the offer, as his firm already uses Claude Code.

“I think they’re trying to use these discounts to gain market share in a world where [every customer has] already made their bets,” Daniluk said. Despite AWS’ generosity, Daniluk says neither Rhythmic nor most of his clients have been adopting Kiro, though he says the product has fans among developers.

“We’re focused on putting our AI technology in the hands of as many customers as possible,” an AWS spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the number of developers using Kiro doubled between the first and second quarter of 2026.

Meanwhile, AWS is finalizing a new program to offer some consulting partners funding to create demos and pilots of its AI products for customers, according to a program participant. The program would offer consultants up to about $50,000 to create demos for clients, and up to around $400,000 for pilots, the person said.