Legacy Software Vendors Offer Discounts to Retain Clients as Anthropic and OpenAI Poach Deals
nashnova research
Microsoft, Workday, Figma and others are discounting AI features aggressively as enterprise customers shift budgets toward Anthropic and OpenAI's native tools — legacy vendors now face a direct trade-off between margins and retention.
Where is the money going, and why are vendors nervous?
Enterprise customers are boosting spend on Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, then cutting budgets for other software.
At the same time, usage-based pricing — pay for what you consume, replacing flat per-seat subscriptions — is pushing bills higher and triggering pushback.
This means → legacy software vendors face a double squeeze: customers are shrinking budgets and shopping for replacements at the same time.
What does Microsoft's "grace period" reveal?
An executive at a global manufacturer worth over $40 billion said Microsoft gave the company at least a one-month grace period after switching GitHub Copilot to usage-based billing, letting it stay on the old per-seat plan.
After the switch, the manufacturer owed Microsoft roughly $150,000 more per month; Microsoft offset part of that with three months of free credits worth tens of thousands each.
Even so, the executive said the team is still evaluating a move to Anthropic's Claude Code and SpaceX-backed Cursor. This reflects a hard truth — discounts can delay the decision, but they can't stop customers from comparison-shopping.
"No discount, no renewal" — how strong is customer leverage?
FICO Chief Information Officer Mike Trkay said dozens of software vendors proactively offered free AI feature bundles at this year's contract renewals.
His words were blunt: "If vendors don't discount significantly or bundle AI into the core license, we basically won't renew — the AI add-ons aren't worth the extra cost."
In plain terms = customers now hold real alternatives (Anthropic, OpenAI), so their bargaining position is fundamentally different — no discount means they switch to native AI tools.
How are Workday and Figma responding?
Workday launched a summer program giving roughly 20 large enterprises free access to its AI platform Sana Enterprise for a full year, covering onboarding, finance, and other HR automation tasks.
Workday CTO Gerrit Kazmaier was candid on the earnings call: "The focus is adoption, adoption, adoption. How that translates into revenue is hard to answer right now."
Figma cut AI product costs by up to half. CEO Dylan Field said the priority is "driving usage," not high margins.
Can discounting-for-adoption last?
Legacy vendors are caught in a bind: on one side, they must pay Anthropic and OpenAI for the foundation models that power their own AI features — an expensive input; on the other, they must discount to keep customers from leaving.
This means → costs are rising while revenue per customer is falling — margins are squeezed from both ends.
Snowflake has shown early signs of AI revenue acceleration, but Workday, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Adobe have yet to hit an inflection point. In plain terms = discounting buys time, not answers — whether "free users" convert into paying customers remains the central unresolved question.
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