Uber's $1,500 AI cap and the SaaS IPO drought

Two vantage points on one force this week: buyers bracing for runaway AI invoices and now imposing hard caps, and public markets repricing SaaS as a category. The through-line is the seat — and what is replacing it.

The AI bill shock of 2026

Three months ago, "AI replaces SaaS" was the dominant thesis. This month it's "AI bankrupts the SaaS budget."

On May 28, Axios reported that a tech company spent $500 million on Claude in a single month after rolling out AI licenses to employees without usage caps. The same week, Uber's CTO disclosed the company had exhausted its full 2026 AI budget by April, with per-engineer costs running $500 to $2,000 a month. On June 2, Uber responded by instituting a $1,500 monthly cap per employee per AI coding tool — Claude Code and Cursor named explicitly — tracked via an internal dashboard, with overages requiring manager sign-off. Microsoft, meanwhile, started winding down most of its internal Claude Code licenses in mid-May, citing ROI that didn't materialize.

It isn't isolated. A 2025 Mavvrik survey found 85% of companies miss their AI cost forecasts by more than 10%. JPMorgan circulated a note this month titled "AI Token Costs are Eating Internet Profits Alive," flagging Shopify, Spotify, ServiceNow, and Roku as named examples where AI consumption is now a visible line item in earnings calls. The supply side isn't healthy either — OpenAI itself is bracing for $14-17B in net losses in 2026, spending roughly $1.69 to generate each dollar earned.

The pricing-lens take: per-seat SaaS pricing has a known cap. Seats × $X is bounded. Token-based AI billing has unbounded liability — a runaway agent loop or a chatty system prompt multiplies costs by 100x overnight, and procurement only sees it on the invoice. That's a structurally different financial risk profile, and most finance teams haven't updated their mental model yet.

What it means for buyers: the AI bill is no longer a back-of-envelope estimate. Demand usage caps on every AI license you provision — Uber's $1,500 monthly ceiling per coding tool is now the public template. Negotiate volume-based price breaks before you scale, not after. And model worst-case token consumption assuming agentic workloads, not single-turn chats — because that's where the $500M invoices come from.

No SaaS company has filed to go public in 2026

On June 1, Anthropic filed confidential IPO paperwork — and not one venture-backed SaaS company has done the same all year. Crunchbase reports zero SaaS unicorn IPO filings in 2026 through Q1, in a market that is otherwise thawing, with SpaceX pricing June 12 and Anthropic close behind.

Enterprise software, normally a reliable IPO feeder, is sitting out an extended selloff. PitchBook puts the median public SaaS EV/revenue multiple at 3.3x as of March 31 — down from 4.9x at the end of 2025 and 6.2x a year earlier. The repricing has a name: the "SaaSpocalypse." TechCrunch traces it to Anthropic's January 12 launch of Claude Cowork, an agentic platform that runs multi-step SaaS workflows autonomously, compounded by soft Q4 earnings and investor fear that per-seat pricing is structurally impaired. The irony: the company whose product triggered the selloff is now the one heading for the exit.

Public markets are doing to SaaS valuations what buyers are starting to do to SaaS invoices — repricing the per-seat model in real time. A multiple cut from 6.2x to 3.3x is the market saying it no longer believes seats compound the way they used to. Private buyers should read the same signal into their next renewal negotiation.

Also this week

• Anthropic filed confidential IPO paperwork on June 1, months after its Claude Cowork launch kicked off the SaaS selloff. (NPR)
• Asana nudged its entry tier to $13.49/month while Jira trimmed to $7.91 in the June 1 tracker run.
• SpaceX targets a $135 share price and $1.77tn valuation for its June 12 debut — the IPO window is open for everyone but SaaS. (CNBC)