Three widely deployed enterprise software vendors made pricing moves this year that look unrelated on the surface. Atlassian is retiring its self-hosted Data Center product. Microsoft folded Copilot into the base Microsoft 365 tiers instead of selling it as an add-on. ServiceNow told investors that half its new business no longer runs on a per-seat license at all. Read together, they show the same pattern: each vendor removed a different point of control that buyers used to negotiate with, and did it inside a single fiscal year.
Atlassian closes the self-hosted door
Atlassian announced in September 2025 that it would sunset Data Center, its self-hosted product line, and push its remaining on-premises customers toward Cloud. The mechanics landed through 2026. Atlassian stopped selling new Data Center subscriptions to net-new customers on March 30, 2026. Existing customers can still buy Data Center licenses and expansions until March 30, 2028. Full end of life, when Data Center licenses go read-only, is set for March 28, 2029, according to Atlassian's own licensing page.
Atlassian raised Data Center prices on the way out the door. Customers on standard list pricing saw a flat 15% increase effective February 17, 2026, notified five weeks earlier on January 15. Customers still on Atlassian's older Advantage pricing saw increases of 18% to 40% depending on user tier, which brought those legacy rates in line with the new list price, per Adaptavist's breakdown of the notice, corroborated by Valiantys's separate account of the same change.
Buyer impact: the choice that used to give Atlassian customers leverage, threaten to stay self-hosted rather than move to Cloud, is closing. A team that wants to keep running Data Center now pays more for a product with a published expiration date and no further platform development. The realistic options are pay the increase, migrate to Cloud on Atlassian's pricing, or start evaluating a different tool before the 2028 cutoff for new licenses.
Microsoft ends the Copilot opt-out
Microsoft announced a global Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging update in December 2025, effective July 1, 2026, that folds Copilot into the core commercial suites rather than selling it as a separate seat-by-seat add-on. Two new bundled plans replaced the old structure. Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot now costs $23.50 per user per month, and Business Premium with Copilot costs $32 per user per month. Both used to be purchasable without the AI layer attached; neither is anymore. Existing customers move to the new packaging at their next renewal after July 1, 2026, with at least 30 days notice inside the admin Message Center, per Microsoft's own public FAQ on the update.
Buyer impact: procurement teams that wanted to defer an AI purchase, or roll it out to a pilot group before buying it company-wide, lose that staging option at renewal. The AI line item that used to sit on a separate PO, easy to cut in a budget review, now sits inside the base contract. IT and finance teams renewing after July 1, 2026 should treat the renewal quote as a de facto Copilot purchase decision, not a routine seat renewal, and negotiate accordingly before signing.
ServiceNow moves off the seat entirely
ServiceNow's shift is less visible because it shows up in a metric, not a press release. On the company's second-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, held July 22, 2026, CFO and President Gina Mastantuono told analysts that "50%, five zero, of our net new business is already non-seat based," attributing the growth to tokens, connectors and other consumption-based assets tied to products like Now Assist, according to ServiceNow's own Q2 2026 results release and the full earnings call transcript. ServiceNow still sells seats, Mastantuono called the model hybrid, but the growth is concentrated in usage-based charges that scale with how much a workflow or AI agent actually runs.
Buyer impact: a seat count is a number a budget owner can forecast a year out. Token or connector consumption is not, especially once an AI agent is doing variable amounts of work per case. Customers renewing ServiceNow contracts should ask specifically what the token-to-dollar conversion looks like under peak usage, not average usage, and push for a consumption cap or true-up ceiling written into the contract rather than discovering the number at the next invoice.
The common thread
None of these three vendors just changed a list price and called it a day. Atlassian took away the deployment option itself. Microsoft took away the ability to say no to a specific feature. ServiceNow took away the one purchase unit customers could actually forecast. Any single one of these would be a routine vendor pricing update. Three large enterprise software companies doing it inside the same twelve months looks less like coincidence and more like a shared read of the moment: renewal season, with AI features as the justification, is when structural pricing change gets pushed through with the least resistance.
The practical response for buyers is similar across all three. Read the renewal notice as a negotiation trigger, not paperwork. Multi-year contracts signed before these changes took effect are the strongest leverage a customer has left, and it is worth asking a vendor directly whether current terms can be extended before new packaging or pricing applies.
What to watch next: ServiceNow's third-quarter 2026 call, expected in October, will show whether non-seat revenue as a share of net new business keeps climbing past the 50% mark reported in July. Atlassian's fiscal 2027 updates, due through the first half of 2027, should start showing how many Data Center customers actually migrated to Cloud versus let support lapse after the March 2026 sales cutoff.
Sources
- Atlassian. "Ascend to the cloud: The next chapter for Atlassian and our customers." 2025. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-ascend
- Atlassian. "Data Center End of Life." Licensing page. https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/data-center-end-of-life
- Adaptavist. "Updates to Atlassian Data Center prices, effective 17 February 2026." 2026. https://www.adaptavist.com/blog/updates-to-atlassian-data-center-prices-effective-17-february-2026
- Valiantys. "Atlassian Data Center Price Changes in 2026." 2026. https://www.valiantys.com/en/resources/atlassian-data-center-price-changes-in-2026
- Microsoft. "Advancing Microsoft 365: New capabilities and pricing update." 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/12/04/advancing-microsoft-365-new-capabilities-and-pricing-update/
- Microsoft. "Microsoft 365 Packaging and Pricing Updates Public FAQ." 2026. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/2026-m365-packaging-pricing-updates-faq
- ServiceNow. "ServiceNow Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results." 2026. https://newsroom.servicenow.com/press-releases/details/2026/ServiceNow-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Financial-Results/default.aspx
- Benzinga. "Full Transcript: ServiceNow Q2 2026 Earnings Call." 2026. https://www.benzinga.com/news/26/07/60627210/full-transcript-servicenow-q2-2026-earnings-call