Solvimon says companies are adopting more complex pricing models as AI changes how software is billed. According to the billing platform, usage-based charges have risen sevenfold since 2025.

Its data points to a shift away from flat monthly fees and seat-based pricing towards combinations of subscriptions and consumption-based charges. The fastest-growing software and AI businesses now use nearly five pricing structures on average, up from three over the past year.

That shift is putting pressure on finance teams as AI products create value in ways that do not fit neatly into older billing systems. Businesses are trying to bill for credits, tokens, usage and outcome-based measures alongside standard subscriptions, increasing the risk of invoicing errors and missed revenue.

A Bain & Company analysis of more than 30 established SaaS vendors found that 65% have already introduced hybrid pricing, adding AI usage or outcome metrics to traditional seat-based models. Solvimon argues that the spread of these structures is making billing one of the more fragile parts of the revenue cycle for companies with expanding product lines and more tailored commercial contracts.

Research from MGI found that SaaS companies can lose between 1% and 5% of annual recurring revenue each year through billing leakage caused by errors that repeat in each billing cycle until detected. For chief financial officers, that is bringing greater scrutiny to systems once treated as back-office tools rather than strategic infrastructure.

A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced “challenges” in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure.

In a report published last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that “while the VA identified its five most widely used software vendors with the highest quantity of licenses installed, it faced challenges in determining whether it was purchasing too many or too few of these software licenses.”

The GAO said that for fiscal 2025, the VA planned to spend about $985 million on software, including commercial software licenses.

In 2015, the GAO identified “the management of software licenses as a focus area” for the VA in a high-risk report.

Another GAO report in January 2024 said the VA should track licenses in use within its inventories and compare them with purchase records.

The VA agreed with the recommendations and – as the latest report states – had taken “preliminary actions” to track software license usage and was due to implement initial functionality for a centralised software license inventory in late March 2026.

“If successful, this could be a critical first step in improving the department’s ability to track and analyse licenses across the department. Implementation of these recommendations would allow VA to identify opportunities to reduce costs on duplicate or unnecessary licenses,” it said.

Before that system went live, the GAO remained concerned that “VA was not tracking the appropriate number of licenses for each item of software currently in use.”

The GAO notes the VA “did not compare inventories of software licenses that were currently in use to purchase records on a regular basis.”

The GAO was also concerned with “restrictive software licensing practices” from vendors, which it defined as “any software licensing agreements or vendor processes that limit, impede, or prevent agency efforts to use software in cloud computing.”

The GAO has tracked progress on this issue since an earlier report in November 2024. It found restrictive software licensing practices affected federal agencies’ cloud computing efforts, including those of VA.

“These practices either increased costs of cloud software or services or limited the department’s options when selecting cloud service providers. VA had not established guidance for effectively managing impacts from restrictive practices for cloud computing or determined who is responsible for managing these impacts,” it said.

The GAO said that “fully assessing software licenses and effectively managing impacts from restrictive licensing practices at VA is an issue of vital importance.”

However, it said that the VA had not fully implemented recommendations from earlier reports.

“If the department continues to experience the challenges we have previously identified and does not take further actions to address our recommendations, it may jeopardise its ability to effectively manage its software licenses that provide critical services to veterans,” said the report.

VA told the GAO it expected to implement additional actions to address the recommendations by September 30, 2026. As of March 2026, VA had not provided an update on the status of the working group, the report said.

Microsoft has been hit with a fresh probe into its business software ecosystem by the British competition regulator, as Europe steps up its efforts to diversify tech stacks and increase digital sovereignty.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority announced on Tuesday it is launching a “strategic market status (SMS) investigation” into the tech giant’s suite of enterprise software, starting in May.

Hundreds of thousands of U.K. businesses and public sector organisations use Microsoft’s business software, which includes Windows, Word, Excel, Teams and AI platform Copilot, every day, the regulator said in a statement.

“An SMS designation would enable us to tackle remaining concerns around Microsoft’s licensing practices in cloud and would also enable us to ensure a level playing field as AI is rapidly embedded into everyday business software tools,” CMA CEO Sarah Cardell said in a statement.

Microsoft is committed to working “quickly and constructively” to address the issues identified by the CMA, said the company’s president, Brad Smith.

“We recognise that the CMA will continue to review and assess additional issues relating to our products and services, including in the business software market,” Smith added in a statement.

Google and Apple were designated with SMS by the CMA in October with regard to their mobile platforms. The status is not a finding of wrongdoing, but it means that the companies must adhere to rules designed to prevent abuse of dominant positions.

Software companies are leaving money on the table because their core financial systems haven’t kept pace with the way they sell pay-per-use services, which often now incorporate AI capabilities.

According to a survey of 350 execs who work for software vendors, conducted by PwC UK and billing infrastructure biz m3ter, 44 percent of UK business leaders say they have trouble measuring the consumption of usage-based software.

PwC and m3ter claim this measurement blind spot leads to revenue leakage – the gap between the value of what the company sells and the amount actually billed.

This can take the form of failure to capture usage data, like a subscription overage fee that isn’t tracked. Or it might reflect out-of-date pricing information, or billing calculation errors.

M3ter claims that between 4 and 7 percent of annual recurring revenue is potentially at risk from unsophisticated bookkeeping.

AI services can compound the problem, with the pricing of AI software and services often opaque and difficult to predict.

With regard to the way that AI complicates billing for companies that use it in their products, the research points to PwC’s 2026 CEO survey that found “only 30 percent of companies surveyed reported increased revenue from AI in the last 12 months.”

“The monetisation opportunity exists, but it is clear that converting AI capability into sustainable, auditable revenue remains a challenge,” the PwC/m3ter report states.

“A useful comparison is with the cloud infrastructure sector,” Griffin Parry, CEO and co-founder of m3ter, said in an email. “They had similar challenges and over time they developed greater transparency, via both better pricing design and better accessibility of usage and spend data.”

But the survey results aren’t solely reflective of black-box AI billing – sometimes it’s just inefficient business processes like tracking multiple product lines that combine seat-based and usage-based billing in a spreadsheet.

The PwC/m3ter survey found that 87 percent of respondents reported that their billing systems and their ERP or general ledger systems were not integrated. And 48 percent said there was no integration between billing and CRM systems.

Parry argues that transparency is a key theme for corporate customers, in terms of pricing design and the accessibility of usage and billing data.

“Good usage pricing should be easy for customers to understand, easy for them to predict (i.e. they can estimate how much they’d pay in real world scenarios), and with the variable element attached to a good proxy for value (i.e., so that if they use more of your service, they’ll associate that with being successful),” said Parry. “That’s one way of interpreting transparency, the opposite of opaque.”

Parry went on to say that customers won’t be satisfied with one monthly invoice that summarises usage-based spending.

“Instead, they’ll want to be able to access information about their usage and spend on a near-real-time basis, and for this data to be detailed – i.e., they want access to a usage and billing dashboard, as, say, AWS customers do,” he explained. “That’s the other way of interpreting transparency, access to the data that drives bills.”