Remember when Uber was $7 across town? That was not a business model. It was a subsidy. The goal was to make you dependent on the convenience until taking a taxi felt unthinkable. Once that happened, prices normalized, and now a ride across town is $35.

AI is running the exact same play.

Right now, companies are receiving enormous credits to get their engineering teams onto Copilot, Cursor, Claude, and a dozen other tools. The pitch is always the same: look how fast your team moves. Look at the productivity gains. The cost is almost nothing. Sign the teams up and let them build workflows around it.

That is the hook.

Once your team cannot ship without an AI assistant, once your processes depend on it, once your engineers have atrophied the muscle of writing code from scratch — that is when the price goes up. You are not leaving. The switching cost is too high and the dependency is real.

We are already seeing the early signals.

GitHub Actions recently reworked its pricing in ways that quietly shift costs upward for teams that rely on it heavily. Anthropic’s plans are usage-based with hourly and weekly caps that punish the exact workflows they encouraged you to build. The free tier gets tighter. The pro tier gets more expensive. The enterprise tier requires a conversation with sales.

This is not a conspiracy. It is just business. Every platform goes through this maturity curve: subsidize adoption, convert users into dependents, then monetize the dependency.

The question is what you do about it.

I am not saying avoid AI tools. That would be like telling someone in 2015 to just take the bus. The tools are genuinely useful and the productivity gains are real. But you should build with the awareness that what is nearly free today will not stay that way.

Architect for substitutability. Do not let a single vendor’s tool become the only way your team can function. Keep your engineers sharp enough to work without the assistant on their shoulder. Audit what you actually depend on and what it would cost when the credits run out.