You remember the $3 Uber rides, right? The too-cheap-to-be-true phase where investor cash was quietly buying your loyalty. That exact playbook is running right now in AI coding tools, and the first big signal just dropped. Microsoft is killing flat-rate Copilot subscriptions on June 1, 2026 and moving everything to pay-as-you-go. Your $20 monthly subscription becomes $20 of pre-paid API credit, which makes the subscription itself pointless. The message is clear: the era of burning investor money to lock you in is closing, and real pricing is about to land. Anthropic made a similar move: Claude Enterprise customers used to pay up to $200 per user per month for a fixed usage allowance. Now they pay a lower base fee plus variable consumption charges, and analysts expect heavy users to see their bills double or even triple. Three things make this shift worth understanding 1.…