Pricing changes and service shutdowns arrive by email, often weeks in advance, and are usually discovered on the bill. Here are the confirmed September deadlines, with what to check for each. We carefully distinguish firm dates from announced targets, which are not dates.
Already in effect: the Sonnet 5 price increase
The promotional rate ended on 1 September. The listed price has risen by around 50%, and we explained in our dedicated article why the real increase is steeper: a tokenizer change makes identical text consume up to 35% more tokens, with a more pronounced effect in French than in English.
What to check now: your token usage on a representative sample, before and after. And your monthly spending caps, which could be hit sooner than expected.
14 September: weekly quotas
An agentic coding tool is moving to weekly usage limits. We described this mechanism in our article on the restructuring of limits: a cap over a rolling seven-day window penalises spikes and favours regular usage.
What to check: your usage profile. If you work in intensive sessions rather than at a steady pace, this change affects you more than a price increase.
24 September: shutdown of a video interface
Programmatic access to a video generation service ends. We noted this in our modality-by-modality comparison: a major US player is withdrawing from this segment, where China now leads.
What to check: if a product depends on this interface, migration must begin. Alternatives exist, but they have neither the same formats nor the same pricing.
30 September: end of a microtask marketplace
A microtask platform created in 2005 is closing. We explained why, and the reason is instructive: workers were having their tasks processed by language models.
What to check: if you used this service for annotation or user testing, alternatives target expert profiles and charge different rates.
Several widely shared deadlines are not confirmed dates: they are announced targets, which slip regularly. We saw this with four successive delays on a single model, and with an IPO timeline we had to correct. Do not plan around a target: plan around firm dates, those that appear in pricing documentation or a deprecation notice.
The method, more useful than the list
This list will be outdated in six weeks. The method will not.
Subscribe to change notices from your critical providers. They warn you, often months in advance. Someone just has to read them.
Pin your versions. Use precise model identifiers rather than generic aliases, as we recommended in our article on deprecation. An alias can switch without warning.
Measure quarterly. The cost per completed task, over a representative period. That is the only metric that factors in pricing, tokenizer, cache, effort and quotas.
Keep a tested alternative. Not identified: tested, with a set of twenty reference cases that tells you what you would lose by switching.
What to take away
September concentrates four changes, and that is not exceptional: it is the normal pace of a sector where pricing tables move every quarter.
The practical consequence is the one we repeat in every form. Do not choose a provider; choose an architecture that lets you switch providers. Those who built something solid on a conquest price will discover sooner or later that they built on a promotion.