How the cost — and energy — of a fixed AI & data stack has changed since 2023, even as the model behind each licence was swapped underneath you.
Enterprise AI bills are pulled two ways. Per-user licences (Copilot, Gemini, Claude) sit on flat prices — you pay per head, not per token. Meanwhile the raw API price of a token stopped falling in 2025 — and the flagship rate doubled in April 2026 (GPT-5.5: $5/$30 vs GPT-5.4's $2.50/$15), with Gemini's app tiers restructured in May 2026 — even as the energy per prompt has broadly fallen. The old "just pay for tokens" advantage is narrowing — the charts below show which side wins.
A licence price barely moves while the model underneath it is swapped — the markers carry that story. Enterprise types are regional list per licence; your licence count drives the expected enterprise-agreement discount on the E5 add-on (≈20% at 5,000) — set a real rate in Licence price override to pin it. Personal subscriptions (Claude Pro / Max) are flat USD fees, FX-converted. Early access is now part of the licence type: the E7 Frontier Suite receives new models on release day, standard enterprise licences ≈6 weeks later, and personal Claude plans on release day. (The free Frontier program — early preview features — is not the paid E7 Frontier Suite; same name, different thing.) The Main model list greys out models the selected licence can't access — M365 Copilot has offered Anthropic models alongside OpenAI's since Sep 2025.
Hover the chart to read the values at any month.
Seat pricing is insensitive to your input/output ratio; API pricing is not — the ratio control above moves the API line and the break-even, never the licence line. That asymmetry is part of what the seat premium buys.
Each service right now — its monthly cost set against the environmental footprint of the same workload, for every model in your stack at the current settings.