LEONAI tax
Your software worked fine for years. Then the renewal email arrived with one new word on it: AI.
When software gets more expensive, it is because AI is genuinely costly to build and run, and the vendor is passing along real costs.
The forced upgrade
The common move is to fold features you already had into a pricier tier with an AI assistant attached. The old plan gets labelled "legacy", which really means expiring. You may not want the assistant, but it doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, the cost of running AI models per task has fallen sharply year after year. Some of the price rise is real cost. A lot of it is an upsell dressed up as AI.
Does it finish something, or decorate something?
AI that completes real work, like drafting the whole report, routing the job or answering the phone, is genuinely valuable. AI that restates the number three inches above it is decoration. Sort these:
"AI insights" that summarize your dashboard in a sentence
An AI receptionist that answers calls and books the job
A chatbot that repeats your help docs
Audit your subscriptions
Push back
Ask for the old plan without the AI add-on. Ask what the AI feature finishes. Pay for completion, not decoration, and remember: if you never asked for it, you can usually walk away from it.
Rewritten from the original No Sacred Cows post for the LeonLink blog.
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