Incumbents, eighteen months in

In January 2025, Figma's AI was a beta inside the seat. GitHub Copilot was a flat $10 or $19 with "unlimited" completions. ClickUp's help centre had said "there are no usage limits for ClickUp AI". Asana's AI Studio had no credit quantity and nothing to buy. Eighteen months later every one of those products has a meter, an allowance and a top-up, three of them publish a burn table, and two bill above the allowance. The seat price, in most cases, is what it was. The bill is not.

Twenty of the 73 reviewed products in the second edition of the AI Credit Index carry the pattern the Index calls the incumbent bolt-on: a seat product that strapped a usage meter onto the seat. This essay is what eighteen months of archived pricing pages show those meters doing, and what a team that buys software by the seat now has to ask before it renews.

The meters hardened#

The Index places every product on one axis, from AI bundled into the seat with no meter, through a meter that does not bite, to a hard stop, to billed overage. Read the bolt-ons along it and the direction is one way.

Figma is the fastest traverse on the panel. No meter in January 2025. An AI-credit allowance per seat around Config 2025 in May, tracked but not enforced. Enforcement from 18 March 2026: run out and AI actions are blocked until an admin buys more. Pay-as-you-go at $0.03 a credit from 1 May 2026, up to an admin-set spending limit. Then, by the 21 September capture, the pack tiers and the per-credit rate were withdrawn from public pages, replaced by “at the pay-as-you-go rate in place at the time”. Bundled to overage in twelve months, and then the price went back behind the login.

GitHub Copilot bolted a premium-request meter onto its seat on 4 April 2025, billing from 18 June at $0.04 a request, then re-based it to token-denominated AI credits at one cent each from 1 June 2026. The seat prices held. In September 2026 GitHub published the Business and Enterprise pools: $19 for 1,900 credits, $39 for 3,900 a seat.

HubSpot ran siloed prepaid packs in January 2025 that simply ran out. In June 2025 it consolidated them into one credit pool with pay-as-you-go overage, mandatory for all accounts by 10 November 2025. On 16 June 2026 the content agent’s burn rose to 1,000 credits a piece at an unchanged credit price. From 16 September 2026, “pay-as-you-go is the default setting” for anyone who buys additional credits, with a spend limit set 50% above the monthly allowance by default.

Notion folded AI into its Business seat in 2025 at fair-use terms, then bolted a hard meter onto the agent layer: from 4 May 2026 custom agents consume credits at $10 per 1,000 with none included, pausing at zero until an admin adds more. Workers, free to try, were scheduled to start drawing credits on 11 August and then on 15 October. September added an annual credit SKU at $13 per 1,000.

monday.com started 2025 with a soft overlay of 500 free credits a month at one credit an action. Through late 2025 it rebased the action to 8 credits while cutting the credit price to a cent, leaving the cost per action unchanged. From 6 May 2026 credits are part of the purchase flow at $10 per 1,000, and the September cards show the arithmetic per plan, with a “special monthly discount” that nets the credit bucket to zero on yearly billing.

Atlassian Rovo sat at a meter that did not bite in January 2025. Rovo Dev, generally available from 8 October 2025 at $20 a seat, brought auto-billed overage at $0.01 a credit. The credit table changed again on 31 August 2026, and default-on extra-usage billing is announced for 3 December 2026.

Asana listed “AI Studio for Smart workflows” with no credit quantity in January 2025. Credits “for purchase” appeared on the page in May 2025, per-plan grants of 50,000, 75,000 and 200,000 credits in May 2026, and a second meter, AI requests at $0.50 prepaid or $0.60 pay-as-you-go, on 15 September 2026. The AI Studio top-up price has never been published.

ClickUp sold Brain as a flat $7 a user add-on with no allowance in January 2025, and its page showed no meter as late as October 2025. AI Super Credits appeared in January 2026; by October the page sells Brain AI at $14 a month with 1,500 credits and Everything AI at $33 with 5,000, packs at $10 for 10,000, and a hard stop at 100% per the help centre.

Miro is the exception that proves the direction: its paid allowances of 25 credits a member on Starter and 50 on Business are what they were on the December 2024 page, and the rung never moved. Even there, Enterprise went from 100 credits a member to a pooled allotment “from 2,500” tiered by seat count, and the bundle price stays in-app.

Add Canva, which raised Pro and Business from $15 to $18 and $20 to $25 while restating its AI allowance in a new unit, and Adobe Firefly, which has sat at a hard stop throughout and ended a first-year promotion this quarter, and the picture is complete. Across all twenty bolt-ons on the panel, January 2025 looked like this: five fully bundled with no meter, seven with a meter that did not bite, seven that stopped at a cap, one billing overage. By October 2026: thirteen stop hard, five bill overage, and two still have a meter that does not bite. Two products sit further left than in January 2025: ElevenLabs, which withdrew overage billing for new self-serve customers in favour of prepaid pay-as-you-go that pauses at zero, and Canva, whose limits now throttle rather than stop. Everything else moved right or held.

The seat is now a floor#

What this does to a buyer is simple to state. For the products above, the per-seat price is the minimum you will pay, and the maximum is set by three numbers the seat price does not contain: what the allowance covers, how fast the burn table drains it, and what happens at zero.

The allowance is the first trap because the incumbents define it differently. Copilot grants credits per seat but pools them across the organisation, as Miro and HubSpot do, so one heavy user can drain everyone’s. Asana’s grants are per plan, not per seat. Notion’s agents have no allowance at all. A 50-seat Business plan at Miro is 2,500 credits for the whole company; at Copilot it is 95,000, also shared.

The burn table is the second, and it is where the quiet increases live. The price didn’t change. Your bill did. described the mechanism; the incumbents supplied the examples this year. HubSpot’s content agent went to 1,000 credits a piece. Rovo rebuilt its table on 31 August 2026. Canva stopped metering Standard tools and restated the allowance in Premium-tool uses. In each case the credit’s dollar price was unchanged and the work’s price moved. monday is the mirror image: it cut the credit to a cent and raised an action from 1 credit to 8, so the work’s price held while both numbers on the page changed.

What happens at zero is the third, and it is the one that has changed most. In January 2025 the usual answer was “nothing, keep going” or “wait for the reset”. In October 2026 the answers are: blocked until an admin buys more (Figma, Notion’s agents, ClickUp, monday); billed automatically up to a cap (HubSpot by default since September, Rovo from December, Figma if an admin opts in); or throttled (Canva). The default has moved from the vendor absorbing the overrun to the customer paying for it, and in two cases this quarter the move was to make paying the default rather than the option.

What the incumbents are still not saying#

Disclosure is where the bolt-ons lag the rest of the panel. Asana’s AI Studio top-up has no public price after eighteen months. Figma published its pack tiers in the spring and withdrew them by September. Miro’s bundles are priced only in-app. Canva’s AI Pass is $100 a person a month in the help docs and its Business top-ups are priced at checkout. Of the incumbents in the category, four of eleven keep at least one self-serve top-up price off every public page. That matters more here than elsewhere because the buyer of a seat product is often not the user who hits the cap; the finance team sees the overage on the invoice, after the fact, at a rate it could not have looked up.

Five questions before the renewal#

How to buy AI without overpaying gave the general checklist. For seat products with a bolted-on meter, these are the five that the eighteen-month record says matter.

1. Which features draw credits? Notion meters its agents, Workers and premium models, plus usage beyond the allowance; Canva only its Premium tools; Copilot its AI credits; Asana now has two meters with two prices. The feature your team actually uses may be inside the allowance or outside it.
2. Is the allowance per seat or pooled? Per seat scales with headcount and strands unused credits; pooled lets one heavy user empty the company’s bucket. Ask which, and ask whether it rolls over. Most do not.
3. What happens at zero, by default? Blocked, billed or throttled. If billed, at what rate, to what cap, and who set the cap. HubSpot’s default cap is 50% above the allowance; Figma’s is whatever the admin typed.
4. Is the pack price public? If the vendor will not publish it, get it in writing before signing. The Index records which tiers hide it.
5. What is the burn table today, and who tells you when it changes? HubSpot dated its change in a legal catalogue; monday’s rebasing was visible only by comparing captures. Write down the credit cost of the three actions your team runs most, and check them at renewal.

The seat price answers none of these. For twenty products on the panel it is now the smallest number on the invoice that you can predict. Every figure above is on the product’s page in the Index, with its archived capture and its dated moves.