💸 You’re paying for tokens. Now what?

Companies are having to pay for tokens. Is this a good thing or a not?

"It’s really about whether the customer can connect spend to value."

Would you go to your gym if you had to pay for every visit? Probably not. We generally prefer those bundled memberships, even if we never hit the leg press after January.

AI companies have, until recently, been a lot like gym owners, offering generous bundles. And most AI users have been like gym-goers, occasional, sometimes frequent users. But others have been voracious and incessant, churning through their Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions.

And now, the AI labs have changed their tune, introducing more usage caps and metered pricing, particularly for coding tools.

So does moving from bundled pricing to metered pricing expand or shrink markets?

It depends.