The death of the flat monthly fee: why pay-per-use is replacing subscription SaaS

Here's a deal nobody would accept at a coffee shop: pay for thirty coffees on the first of the month, then come in whenever you like. Drink three, drink thirty, same price. If you forget to cancel, it renews.

That's how most software has been sold for the last fifteen years. The flat monthly fee was a great deal for the companies selling it, and for a while it was a fair deal for us too. It isn't any more, and the market is starting to notice.

How we ended up paying for software we don't use

Subscription SaaS replaced the boxed licence for good reasons. No big upfront cost, updates arrive on their own, your files live in the cloud. For a tool you open every day, a monthly fee makes sense.

The trouble is that most of us don't use most of our tools every day. You need a booking page when you take client calls, a transcription tool when you record an interview, a survey tool twice a year. But the price is the same in the busy month and the quiet one. You're not paying for what you use. You're paying for the right to use it, whether you do or not.

Multiply that by a dozen tools and it adds up fast. When the research firm C+R Research surveyed 1,000 US consumers in 2022, people guessed they spent $86 a month on subscriptions. When they went through it category by category, the real figure was $219. And 42% said they'd at some point forgotten about a subscription they were still paying for.

Companies have the same problem at a bigger scale. Zylo, which tracks software spend for businesses, found in its 2025 SaaS Management Index that organisations spend $4,830 per employee on SaaS a year, and waste around $21 million a year on average on licences nobody uses.

What pay-per-use actually means

Pay-per-use (you'll also see "pay-as-you-go", "usage-based" or "consumption-based") is simple: the bill follows what you do. Send 1,000 emails, pay for 1,000 emails. Store 200 GB, pay for 200 GB. Take five paid bookings, pay for five. A month where you do nothing costs nothing, or close to it.

A few real examples from our catalog:

• Booking pages. BooknTalk charges €1 per paid booking instead of a monthly seat fee, and refunds it if the booking is cancelled. Compare that with Calendly's per-seat plans.
• Storage. Backblaze B2 charges per terabyte you actually store, with the first 10 GB free. See Storage & Backup.
• Email sending. Amazon SES charges per thousand emails sent, not per subscriber on your list. More in Email & Newsletters.
• AI chat. Through the API you pay per token. We worked out what that means for a real month in ChatGPT Plus vs paying per token.

Why it's taking over now

Usage pricing isn't new. Cloud infrastructure has worked this way since the start, and it was already spreading through software before the AI boom: OpenView Partners found that 45% of SaaS companies had some form of usage-based pricing in 2021, up from 34% a year earlier. Three things have pushed it from niche to normal since then.

AI costs real money per request. Every time an AI feature answers a question, someone pays for the compute. A flat fee means light users subsidise heavy ones, or the vendor loses money on its best customers. So AI products are being priced by what they do. Salesforce, the company that made per-seat SaaS famous, now sells its Agentforce AI agents per conversation and per action, alongside its classic per-user licences.

Buyers are counting. Finance teams now audit software spend line by line, and households do the same with their bank statements. When people look closely, unused seats and forgotten renewals are the first thing to go.

Payments got cheaper and easier. Charging €1 for a single booking or a few cents for an API call used to be awkward. Modern payment and metering tools make small, frequent charges routine, so a vendor can bill for exactly what happened instead of rounding everything up to a monthly plan.

Is pay-per-use always cheaper?

No, and it's worth being honest about that. If you live in a tool all day, every day, a flat subscription can be the better deal. Usage pricing wins when your use is uneven, and for most people and most tools, it is.

Before you switch, check three things:

• Your real usage. Look at the last three months, not your best intentions.
• Spending caps. Good usage-based tools let you set a monthly limit or an alert. Use it.
• Hidden minimums. Some "pay as you go" plans have a monthly minimum, which is a subscription in disguise.

And there's a third option the subscription era almost made us forget: buying software once. A one-time licence is the other half of what we list here. We collected a set of them in Software without a subscription.

The flat fee isn't dead yet, but it's no longer the default

Subscriptions will stick around for the tools you genuinely use daily. What's ending is the assumption that every piece of software should be rented by the month. When the price follows the value, both sides win: you stop paying for idle months, and the vendor gets paid when it's actually useful.

That's the idea behind unsubs.org. We list only tools you pay for by use or buy once. Browse the catalog, or suggest a tool we've missed.