You're Paying an AI Tax You Never Voted For
Every subscription you own is growing an AI tier you didn't ask for and can't switch off. Guess who pays.
In January 2025, Microsoft raised the price of Microsoft 365 Personal from $69.99 a year to $99.99. First increase since the plan launched over a decade ago. The reason, stated out loud, was Copilot. The AI assistant is bundled in now, so the whole subscription costs about 43% more. You wanted a word processor and somewhere to keep your files. You got an AI you might never open, and a bill that went up to pay for it.
That's the AI tax, and it's already on your statement. Google did the same move. Early 2025, Gemini got folded into Workspace, Business Standard climbed from $12 to $14 per user a month, and the separate $20-a-month AI add-on quietly disappeared into the base price. Notion, Slack, Zoom, Adobe, Salesforce. Every one of them found a way to bolt an AI meter onto a product you already bought and already knew how to use.
The trick is the bundle. If they sold you AI as an optional add-on, you'd look at the number and decline. Most people did. Enterprise Copilot launched at $30 a seat and adoption was a rounding error. So the play changed. Stop asking. Roll it into the base subscription, lift the floor, and now there's no line item left to say no to. You're not buying AI. You're buying Word, and Word costs more this year.
The genius of the AI tax is that there's no checkbox to uncheck.
Why package it this way? Because the AI has to earn its story. These companies spent a sum on GPUs that only pencils out if the spending turns into revenue soon, and consumer demand isn't showing up on its own. Regular people are not lining up to pay twenty bucks a month for a chatbot living in their spreadsheet. So instead of convincing you, they conscript you. Bundle it, count every one of those renewals as an "AI user," and read the number off the earnings call. You became an adoption statistic by paying your email bill.
Here's the part that should bother you. Usage is optional. Payment isn't. It makes no difference whether you ever click the little sparkle button, because the revenue is already booked. The "AI-powered" tier is the only tier on offer. Treat it as a revolution or ignore it completely, you paid the same either way. That's not a product. It's a tollbooth somebody built on the road you were already driving.
And it ratchets one direction. Subscription prices are sticky going up and effectively impossible coming down. Microsoft is not going to wake up next year, decide Copilot underwhelmed, and put you back to $69.99. The new floor is the floor forever. That's the entire appeal of bundling to a finance team. You get to raise the permanent baseline of the business and pin it on a technology nobody wants to admit they barely touch.
The real tell is that none of this arrived with a price you could weigh. When something is genuinely worth $30, they sell it to you for $30 and let you decide. When it's worth less than that to most people, they tuck it inside a $3 bump you'll grumble about and pay. Every one of these hikes lives in the same narrow window: just annoying enough to complain about, just small enough that you won't cancel over it. That placement isn't luck. That's pricing.
I'm not even mad at the software. Some of these tools are useful, and I use a few of them daily. The dishonest part is the packaging. Tell me it's an upsell and let me pass. Don't rename the whole subscription, jack the price, then turn around and tell your shareholders I'm a devoted fan of a feature I've never once opened. There's a word for charging everyone for something most of them don't use and calling the result demand. Innovation isn't it.
So go check the statement. The AI boom you keep reading about, the adoption curves, the hockey-stick charts. Some of it is real. And some of it is you, forgetting to cancel, handing three extra dollars a month to a computer that's out there counting you as a believer.