The post-SaaS era: what software business models will look like in 2026 and beyond

Every era of software has had a default way of charging for it. For a long time it was the box on a shelf. Then it was the monthly subscription. Both felt permanent while they lasted. Neither was.

We're now at the start of the next shift. To see where it's going, it helps to look at how we got here.

A very short history of paying for software

The licence era. Through the 1980s and 1990s you bought software once, on a disk or a CD, and it was yours. Want the new version? Buy the upgrade. Vendors earned money in big waves around each release, and customers could skip versions they didn't need.

The SaaS era. In 1999 Salesforce launched with a "no software" pitch: nothing to install, just log in and pay monthly per user. Over the next decade the idea took over. Microsoft launched Office 365 in 2011, and in 2013 Adobe announced it would stop developing new boxed versions of Creative Suite in favour of the Creative Cloud subscription. By the late 2010s, "per seat, per month" was simply how business software was sold.

It worked brilliantly for vendors. Predictable recurring revenue is exactly what investors love. For customers it was fine at first: no big upfront cost, constant updates. The cost showed up later, as more and more tools moved to the same model and the bills stacked up.

Why the subscription model is cracking

Three pressures are hitting it at once.

• Customers are tired of paying for idle time. Surveys keep finding the same gap between what people think they spend and what they actually spend. We covered that in Subscription fatigue is real.
• AI breaks per-seat pricing. If an AI agent does the work of three people, charging per human user no longer tracks the value. And every AI answer has a real compute cost, so flat pricing gets risky for vendors.
• Building got cheap. AI coding tools let teams build simple tools themselves. Retool's 2026 survey found 35% of respondents had already replaced at least one SaaS tool with something they built. More on that in Unbundling the SaaS bloat.

The models replacing it

1. Pay per use

The bill follows activity: per booking, per gigabyte, per email, per thousand tokens. Cloud infrastructure has worked this way for years, and it's spreading up into everyday apps. For anyone whose usage goes up and down, which is most of us, it's simply fairer. See why pay-per-use is replacing the flat monthly fee.

2. Pay per execution

This is pay-per-use taken to its finest grain: you pay each time a piece of code runs. AWS Lambda popularised it, charging per request and per millisecond of compute, with nothing to pay when nothing runs. AI agents are bringing the same idea to business software. Salesforce now charges for Agentforce per conversation and per action, not only per user. Expect much more software priced by the task it completes.

3. Pay once, again

The one-time licence never died. It went quiet. Independent developers kept selling apps you buy once, and some big names still offer it: Microsoft sells Office Home 2024 as a one-time purchase alongside Microsoft 365. A common modern twist is "buy once, get a year of updates", so the developer still has a reason to keep improving the app, and you keep the version you paid for forever. We rounded up a few in Software without a subscription.

4. Hybrids

Many products will mix models: a small base fee plus usage, credits that never expire, or a one-time app with a pay-per-use cloud add-on. The test for whether a hybrid is fair is simple. Does a quiet month cost you close to nothing?

What about open source and self-hosting?

They're part of the picture. Open-source projects and self-hosted software have grown alongside SaaS, and some teams use them to avoid recurring fees entirely. The catch is that "free" software you run yourself still costs time: servers, updates, backups and security are now your job. That's a fine trade for technical teams who want it, but it's a different deal from buying a finished product, and it's not what we cover here. Unsubs.org focuses on tools someone else runs and maintains, that you pay for by use or buy once.

What this means for you

• As a buyer: stop treating "per seat, per month" as the only option. For most tools there's now a usage-based or one-time alternative, and the vendor that charges you only when it's useful has to keep being useful.
• As a business: watch for vendors moving to outcome or usage pricing, and negotiate. "Could we pay per use?" is now a normal question.
• As a software maker: customers increasingly expect to pay for value delivered, not access granted. Pricing that matches that is becoming a selling point.

The subscription won't disappear. It'll go back to being one option among several, used where it fits. If you want to see what the alternatives look like today, browse the catalog, from AI & Chat to Hosting & Deploy.