The average company runs 101 apps, according to Okta's Businesses at Work 2025 report. Now that an agent can work inside them without you, one line of your software budget is getting hard to defend: the subscriptions nobody opens.
Clippy had the idea, not the means
In 1997, Microsoft put a paperclip inside Word. Clippy could see you typing “Dear Sir”, but it had no idea who you were writing to, why, or what you wanted out of the letter. It guessed wrong at the wrong moment, and users mocked it hard enough that Microsoft eventually switched it off.
What it lacked was context and permission to act. Both arrived recently: models that can handle a request phrased in ordinary language, and since November 2024 an open protocol, MCP, that standardises the connection between a model and your software. An agent can now read your CRM, your project base and your analytics without a custom integration for every pair of tools, which also changes how your website needs to be prepared for AI agents.
A seat costs the same whether anyone uses it
SaaS solved a real problem in 2000. No licences to repurchase every three years, no servers to maintain, a predictable invoice. In exchange, every need got its own app, its own subscription and its own database, up to those 101 apps on average.
Follow one prospect through your stack. They email you, you copy the name into the CRM, you look the company up somewhere else, you create a task, you add a meeting, you tell the team. Each tool does its job properly. The handover between them is yours, and it shows up on no invoice.
Because billing runs per seat, an account opened three times a month costs exactly what an account opened three times a day costs.
Stripe put $7.5 billion into token plumbing
On 19 August 2026, Stripe announced it was buying OpenRouter, the gateway that routes requests across more than 400 models from more than 80 providers. The New York Times reported a price of around $7.5 billion, for a company valued at $1.3 billion three months earlier.
Patrick Collison summed up the reasoning: tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and profitability now turns on how they are spent. Stripe had already shipped Token Billing so companies could measure that usage and bill it on.
The consequence lands on your side of the table. A vendor whose product puts a model to work pays on every request, so it can no longer sell you a hundred dormant seats at no extra cost. And you have no reason left to buy a hundred.
The Airtable signal
On 4 August 2026, Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, which works out to roughly $2.25 billion in equity value once net cash is counted. The company was still reporting about $480 million in annual recurring revenue as of June 2026, growing more than 20% year on year.
The honest comparison is $2.25 billion today against $11.7 billion at the 2021 peak. Half a billion in recurring revenue and double-digit growth no longer carry the multiple they used to, even though that profile is exactly what buyers paid the most for five years ago.
Three questions to ask of every subscription
- Can your data leave? Documented API, full export, a connector you can actually use. If the answer is no, you are not renting a tool, you are renting access to your own data.
- How many licences were opened last month? The number, not the impression. It is the most profitable line to cut in a software budget.
- What does the tool teach you to do? Linear sells one precise way to run a product cycle, with very little left to configure. Software that imposes a good method keeps its value even when an agent can click for you.
What I do on my side
On Harmonia, my family app, I read the activation funnels from a chat window wired to the analytics tool. I only open the dashboard now to check a number.
On Coddy, our urban exploration games across 9 countries, the flow runs without us from booking through to game instructions, and 10% of bookings need a human.
None of those tools went away, and I still pay for all of them. I stopped opening them for the work that did not need me.
Where to start
Start with a map rather than a round of cancellations: what you pay for, what you actually open, what an agent can reach and what stays locked behind a screen. The duplicates show up immediately. If you want to see where this shift leads on the customer side, it has a name, the B2A2C model.
I run a 25-minute audit, free, on your stack and your processes. You leave with a clear diagnosis, not a sales pitch.
