Pull up your bank statement and add up the recurring software charges — the CRM, the email tool, the scheduling thing, whatever design app you signed up for that one time. If the total is bigger than it was a year ago and you don't remember agreeing to any of that, you're not losing it. The tools got more expensive while you weren't looking, and most of us only notice when the card gets declined or the accountant asks.

There's a name for it going around now: the "AI tax."

What the "AI tax" actually is

Software companies spent the last two years bolting AI onto products you already pay for. A writing assistant that lives in your email now. A "smart summary" button in your project tool that you've maybe clicked once. Those features aren't free for the vendor — every time someone uses them it burns real compute — so the cost landed back on you, usually without a heads-up, and usually on stuff you never asked to have turned on in the first place.

The numbers are specific. Forbes reported this spring that a $50 CRM quietly became $75. A $30 project tool went to $45. A $20 email tool went to $35. For a business juggling 10 to 15 different subscriptions, that adds up to an extra $200 to $400 every month — and by their own reporting, much of it delivers no measurable benefit at all.

This isn't the normal creep. SaaS prices have always drifted up 5 to 15 percent a year, and you shrug and pay it. The AI tax is different. Analysts who track software renewals are seeing 20 to 37 percent jumps tied specifically to bundled AI, and vendors are packaging those features into mandatory tiers so you can't opt out. Microsoft 365 is a clean example: Business Basic went from $6 to $7 per user, Business Standard from $12.50 to $14. That's the polite end. Some frontline license tiers jumped 25 to 33 percent.

For a company with a finance team, this is a line item somebody catches. For a one-person shop it's $40 on one card, $15 on another, a $180 annual charge you forgot about back in March — and it never shows up as one big scary number you'd actually react to. That's not an accident. The pricing is built around the fact that you're busy and you're not going to sit down and add it all up. The whole thing runs on your inattention.

The one-afternoon audit

You can claw a lot of this back in an afternoon, and you don't need a subscription-tracking app that — of course — also costs money. Just your bank statement and an honest hour.

Write down every recurring software charge, monthly and annual. Go back a full twelve months, because the annual ones are where the real forgotten money hides.

Next to each one, write down what it costs now and the last time you genuinely used it — not the last time you meant to, the last time you actually opened the thing. Then start sorting.

Cancel. Anything you haven't opened in 60 days. Be ruthless here. The design app you signed up for during one busy week, the scheduling tool you replaced but never turned off, the "productivity" thing a podcast talked you into. If you needed it, you'd have opened it. Most people find two or three of these on the first pass.

Downgrade. Tools you use, but on a plan bigger than your actual life. A lot of the AI tax is riding in premium tiers you were auto-migrated into. Check whether a cheaper plan still does the part you rely on. Often the AI features you're now paying for are the only reason the price went up — and you were doing fine without them.

Replace. Tools where a free version does 90 percent of what you need. Wave handles invoicing for free. Zoho Invoice does too. Cal.com and TidyCal cover scheduling without Calendly's price. ChatGPT and Claude both have real free tiers for the writing help you might be paying a vendor to bolt onto another app.

The part vendors hope you skip

A few things worth knowing before your next renewal hits.

Watch the annual-vs-monthly trap. Vendors push annual plans because they lock in the higher price and bet you'll forget to cancel. If you're auditing anyway, switch the tools you're unsure about to monthly, even if it costs a little more per month. The flexibility to leave is worth it.

Ask for legacy pricing. This sounds naive and it works more than you'd think. Email support, say the new price doesn't fit your budget, and ask to stay on your old plan. Companies would rather keep you at the old rate than lose you entirely, and a surprising number have a quiet button for exactly this.

And turn off the AI add-ons you didn't ask for. Notion AI is about $10 per member a month on top of your base plan. If your team of three is paying for AI none of you use, that's $360 a year for a feature you'd never miss. Go into settings and look. These get switched on by default far more often than people realize.

None of this is hard. That's almost the frustrating part — the whole thing survives on nobody bothering to look, so the only real move is to look. Sit down once, on purpose, and add it up. You'll probably find something you'd forgotten you were paying for; most people do. Cancel that one, at least, and you're already ahead of where you were this morning.