Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) charges for the work AI agents do in its Fusion Cloud Applications in AI Units, which its Fusion price list sets at $1,000 per 100,000, or a cent each, on top of the per-user subscriptions it already sells. Chris Leone, Oracle's executive vice president of applications development, told investors on October 28 that the meter lets Oracle earn more as AI does more of the work, without customers buying more seats.
Oracle keeps its most autonomous agents off its cheaper models. Oracle's contract terms for Fusion rate Fusion Claw, the runtime behind 25 agentic applications Oracle released on September 29, on only two kinds of model: 20 units, or 20 cents at list price, for every 10,000 tokens on a frontier model, and 10 units on a model the customer brings and pays for separately. Oracle showed the applications again at its AI World conference in Las Vegas on October 26.
How the meter counts
The rules sit in Oracle's Fusion AI Units Actions Table, effective October 1. For each action an agent takes, Oracle adds the input and output tokens, divides by 10,000, rounds up and multiplies by a factor for the kind of work and the class of model. General work, such as answering questions or approving transactions, uses no units on Oracle's basic model, OpenAI's GPT-OSS, 5 units per 10,000 tokens on a balanced model such as OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna, and 20 on a frontier model such as GPT-5.5 or Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash.
Work | Balanced model | Frontier model | Own model |
|---|---|---|---|
General | 5 cents | 20 cents | 3 cents |
Making documents | 20 cents | 20 cents | 10 cents |
Fusion Claw | Not offered | 20 cents | 10 cents |
List price per 10,000 tokens, or part of 10,000, used by one action. Source: Oracle's Fusion AI Units Actions Table, effective October 1, 2026; SaasBuzz calculation at a cent a unit. On the basic model, general work is free, documents cost 10 cents and Fusion Claw is not offered. A customer using its own model also pays that model's provider.
Customers of "applicable Fusion Cloud Services" get 30,000 units a month free for each production environment, worth $300 at list price, up from 20,000 in the version of the terms dated September 10. At the frontier rate, that covers up to 15 million tokens of Claw work, by SaasBuzz's calculation. Units are counted in development and testing as well as production, purchased units left at the end of a contract are forfeited, and when a balance falls below zero, Oracle "may limit, reduce, or block access" to the functions that use them. Oracle can change the tables on 30 days' notice. Leone's investor-day slides add that steps run as "deterministic execution" use no units.
Seats stay, and the AI plans come with units
Leone said Oracle is "extending the subscription-based business that we have today" with "a usage-based metric," according to a transcript of the investor day published by StockAnalysis. "We sell seats, we sell employees," he said. Fusion's ERP application still lists at $625 per named user a month, with a minimum of 10 users.
The AI options are priced on top, and each comes with units. An Agentic Applications subscription, which the terms say gives access to agentic applications across the suite, lists at $500,000 a year with 2.5 million units for each full month: 30 million a year, worth $300,000 at list, or 60% of the fee, by SaasBuzz's calculation. The per-user AI Agents plan costs $150 per named user a month, with a minimum of 50, or $5 per employee, with a minimum of 500, and brings 15,000 or 500 pooled units a month each. At a cent a unit, the units are worth exactly the fee, so the plan buys metered work rather than unlimited use.
Leone said Oracle had "rolled this out a few months ago," according to the transcript, and the version of the terms archived in October 2025 has no AI Units. The October 1 table renamed its "Premium" tier "Balanced" and added the frontier tier and the Fusion Claw row.
The products that were new at AI World change how employees reach the agents. Fusion Companion lets employees work in Fusion through AI tools such as ChatGPT, and Fusion Agentic Home puts the same layer inside Fusion itself. Oracle announced both without a price or a release date, and Leone's slides list both under "Consumption revenue/AI Units".
How rivals price an agent's work
Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and SAP (NYSE: SAP) publish meters of their own. Their pricing pages share Oracle's two-part design, a consumption price plus a per-user plan, with one difference: Salesforce's and Microsoft's per-user plans take employees' use of agents off the meter, while Oracle's buys a block of units.
Vendor | Unit price | Per action | Per user |
|---|---|---|---|
Oracle | 1 cent | 0 to 20 units per 10,000 tokens | $150, buys 15,000 units |
Salesforce | 0.5 cents | 20 credits, 10 cents | $125, staff use unmetered |
Microsoft | 0.8 cents | 5 credits, 4 cents | $30, staff use not charged |
SAP | Not listed | 0.02 to 0.05 units | 35 units, for consultants |
Monthly list prices, checked October 29, 2026; unit prices and cents per action are SaasBuzz calculations. Sources: Oracle's price list and terms; Salesforce's Agentforce pricing ($500 per 100,000 Flex Credits, 20 per action); Microsoft's Copilot Studio pricing (25,000 credits for $200) and billing rates (5 credits per agent action, no charge for staff with Microsoft 365 Copilot, within fair-use limits); SAP's AI pricing, which lists no dollar price for its units.
What metered AI means for buyers and for Oracle
For buyers, the AI part of a Fusion bill now moves with use, and Oracle's documents make it hard to forecast. None of the price list, the terms or the investor-day slides says how many tokens a typical run of a Claw-powered application such as Ledger or Supply Planning Allocation uses, so the cost of a task cannot be read from them. The choice of model alone moves general work from free to 20 cents per 10,000 tokens, and a frontier model costs four times a balanced one. Because testing counts, a pilot draws down the same balance as production.
For Oracle, the meter answers what seat pricing cannot when customers' workforces shrink. "AI Units enable consumption revenue to grow independently of user counts, as AI completes more work without requiring additional users," one of Leone's slides said. Simon de Montfort Walker, Oracle's executive vice president of industry applications, described the same shift on stage: "It just happens that most of the users are machines all of a sudden," he said, according to the transcript. SaasBuzz's analysis of the October 28 results found Microsoft and ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) describing the same move toward consumption.
Leone summed up the revenue case for investors, The Register reported.
The more work that gets done by AI in our system, the more revenue we will see because they're consuming AI units as that work is getting done. We don't have to add more seats in order for us to now generate more revenue.Chris Leone, executive vice president of applications development at Oracle, at its investor day on October 28, as quoted by The Register
"Our margin on the AU component is actually really good," Leone also told investors, according to the transcript, explaining that "part of it is token cost, part of it is compute cost." Slides from chief financial officer Hilary Maxson list "subscription plus consumption" pricing among the ways applications support the 40% non-GAAP operating margin Oracle targets for fiscal 2030.
