Cardboard

One CRM takes 86% of the spend. We see the card payments behind company software spend. Here is the last 12 months: 🇺🇸 HubSpot 86.1% 🇪🇪🇺🇸 Pipedrive 6.4% 🇬🇧 Attio 5.7% 🇺🇸 Salesforce 0.8% 🇫🇮 Zero 0.5% And the gap is widening. HubSpot went from 78% to 86% of the category in twelve months. More competition, less fragmentation. Not what we expected to find. The part we are watching is further down the list. Attio, out of London, has more than doubled its customer count in a year and now sits level with Pipedrive on logos. Zero, out of Helsinki, took its first payment in our data in December 2025 and is still tiny, but it keeps turning up month after month. American companies take 93% of this category. The two most interesting challengers in it are European. We are cheering for them, and we will keep tracking both. Two caveats. Pipedrive gets two flags. Founded in Tallinn, but headquartered in New York and majority-owned by Vista Equity since 2020, so we are counting it as American. Argue with us in the comments. And this is card-paid spend only. Salesforce bills on annual invoices, so it barely registers here. That is about payment rails, not performance. First edition of the Cardboard CRM Index. More categories coming. Read more about Cardboard here: https://cardboard.inc/

Just as many companies now pay for Claude as for ChatGPT. But Anthropic collects 3.6x the revenue. At Cardboard we see what companies actually pay for their software, across everything the two sell: ChatGPT, Claude, APIs and tools. Over the last 12 months: - A year ago, roughly 4x more organizations paid OpenAI than Anthropic - Today the organization counts are nearly equal - Total monthly spend on Anthropic passed OpenAI in March, and the gap has widened every month since Equal adoption. Wildly unequal monetization. The payment data suggests why. OpenAI gets paid mostly in seats: per-employee ChatGPT plans, steady and predictable, ceiling set by headcount. Anthropic gets paid increasingly in usage: API, coding tools, heavier tiers. The bill grows when the work grows. This is one market seen from one vantage point, and payments can't tell us about satisfaction or intent. But the monetization gap itself is unambiguous. Does this match what you're seeing? If you have visibility into AI spend in your own company or customer base, I'm curious whether the same split shows up: broad but shallow on one side, narrower but much deeper on the other. Aggregated, anonymized Cardboard subscription data. Chart below. Check out Cardboard here: https://cardboard.inc/

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