Hype Index: 'You Can No Longer Buy Software Without Paying for AI'

TL;DR: Mostly true, and less true than the headlines. I checked 20 widely deployed SaaS suites on August 15, 2026 for a currently purchasable tier that excludes the vendor's AI feature. Fourteen gave a clear answer from public pages. Twelve of the fourteen sell no AI-free tier at any price. Two still do, and only one of those two lists it on its pricing page. On the pricing half of the claim, Microsoft's own table shows eight of ten Microsoft 365 suite prices moved on July 1, 2026, with a median increase of 12.5% and a maximum of 33%, not the 43% in circulation.

The claim under test is the thing procurement teams have been saying since July: AI is no longer a line item you can decline. Here is what the public pages actually support.

What is the claim?

Microsoft repriced Microsoft 365 commercial suites on July 1, 2026 and folded baseline Copilot Chat into the packaging. Trade coverage compressed that into a range, "5 to 43%," and into a conclusion: you can no longer buy an office suite without buying AI with it. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened a consumer protection investigation, announced on 29 July 2026, into whether customers were given clear information about their options when Copilot was added to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family. The CMA's own page is explicit about its status: "At this stage, the CMA has reached no conclusions about whether Microsoft has broken the law." Nothing below says otherwise, and any sentence you read that implies a finding is inventing one.

How many suites still sell an AI-free tier?

I named 20 suites, then asked three questions of each from public pricing and help-centre pages only: is there any currently purchasable tier without the AI feature, did the base price move when AI arrived, and is that AI-free tier discoverable from the pricing page.

Fourteen settled. Twelve have no AI-free purchasable tier: Microsoft 365 commercial, Google Workspace (all four tiers list Gemini), Notion, Slack (every plan including Free lists AI), ClickUp, Asana (every paid tier includes AI Studio credits; only the free Personal plan lacks them), monday.com (AI credits on every seat), Figma (AI credits on every plan), Miro, Grammarly, HubSpot (credits from Starter up) and Zendesk (AI agents from Suite Team at $55 per agent per month).

Two still sell one. Box lists Business Starter as a paid tier without Box AI, right there on the pricing page. Microsoft sells Microsoft 365 Personal Classic and Family Classic to consumers without Copilot, and does not list them on the pricing page at all.

So the honest score is 2 of 14, and 1 of 14 if you require that a buyer can find it unaided.

Did the price actually go up when AI arrived?

This is where the claim is weakest, because the number everyone repeats is not on Microsoft's page. Microsoft's own pricing update lists ten suite prices. Eight moved: Office 365 E3 from $23 to $26, Office 365 E5 from $38 to $41, Microsoft 365 E3 from $36 to $39, Microsoft 365 E5 from $57 to $60, Business Basic from $6 to $7, Business Standard from $12.50 to $14, F1 from $2.25 to $3.00, and F3 from $8 to $10. Two did not move at all: Office 365 E1 stayed at $10 and Business Premium stayed at $22.

Median increase across the eight that moved: 12.5%. Largest: 33%, on F1, the cheapest frontline seat. I could not find 43% anywhere on Microsoft's own table.

The closest thing to 43% is somewhere else entirely, and the CMA printed it. In the UK, Classic Microsoft 365 Personal costs £59.99 a year against £84.99 for the Copilot version, and Classic Family costs £79.99 against £104.99. That Personal gap is £25, or 41.7%. It is not a price increase Microsoft applied to a plan. It is the spread between two plans, one of which is unlisted. Quoting it as an increase is how "up to 43%" got into circulation, and it is the single most repeated error in coverage of this change.

Where does the trail go dark?

In two specific places, and I am not going to paper over either.

Six of my 20 never resolved. Adobe's Creative Cloud plans page timed out twice. Canva, Zoom, Atlassian and Airtable serve pricing that is rendered client-side or truncated, so the raw pages I could read did not state per-tier AI inclusion. Dropbox's comparison table markets AI integrations without listing them as a tier feature. I measured what the public pages returned to me, not what a logged-in browser would show, and those are different things.

The second dark spot is the interesting one. Microsoft's Classic consumer plans are documented by Microsoft's own support answers and by the CMA, but the route to them runs through a cancellation or downgrade flow inside a signed-in billing account. I have no account and I am not going to pretend to have walked it. What I can say from public pages is the part that matters: the AI-free option exists, it is £25 a year cheaper, and it is not on the page where people buy.

That gap between "exists" and "findable" is the whole subject of the CMA's investigation, and it is why the investigation is about disclosure rather than about the price itself.

What would change my mind?

A vendor reintroducing a discoverable AI-free tier at a lower price would break the pattern immediately, and Box shows it is commercially survivable. So would evidence that most of these price moves track hosting, storage and security additions rather than AI, which is plausible: Microsoft's July packaging also added Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 and 50GB of extra mailbox storage to some tiers, and unbundling those from Copilot from the outside is guesswork. And six unresolved suites is enough to move 2-of-14 to something else.

What would not change my mind is another round of coverage repeating 43% without saying which two numbers produced it.

Verdict

The direction is real. Twelve of fourteen suites I could settle sell no AI-free tier at any price, AI-free tiers now survive mainly as retention offers rather than products, and the one-way ratchet in AI pricing is the same one that turned premium AI subscriptions into a $1,400-a-month stack. The tiering logic is also familiar from the other direction: the same vendors sort you by plan when deciding whose work trains the models.

The noise is the absolutism and the arithmetic. "No longer possible" is false, twice over, and the headline percentage is a plan gap dressed as a price rise.

Verdict: 30% noise / 70% signal. You can still buy software without AI. You mostly cannot find it, which is a different complaint, and the one a regulator is actually asking about.