AI Billing Insights & Guides
Technical deep dives, pricing strategies, and unit economics for AI startups. Learn from real-world examples and data.
Recent Posts
From Seats to Outcomes: How Agentic Workflows Are Reshaping AI Pricing
SaaS to Service-as-Software shifts pricing from seats to outcomes. Learn about outcome-based billing, agent cost attribution, and agentic infrastructure.
OpenAI Cut o3 Prices 80%: Did You Recalculate Your Margins?
OpenAI slashed o3 pricing from $10/$40 to $2/$8 per million tokens. Cursor and Windsurf adjusted the same day. Most startups didn't. Here's how to recalculate your margins and what to do with the savings.
Unit Economics for AI Products: A Complete Cost Framework Beyond Tokens
Most AI startups track costs incompletely. Tokens are not your unit—traces are. Learn the complete cost model for AI products, from orchestration overhead to reliability loops, and how to calculate per-customer margins that reflect reality.
Multi-Model Routing: How to Cut AI Costs 40-60% Without Sacrificing Quality
Learn how intelligent model routing can dramatically reduce your AI API costs by matching query complexity to the right model—from classification tasks on Haiku to complex reasoning on Opus.
Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol: What It Means for AI Billing
Stripe announced AI-specific billing tools including hybrid pricing and real-time inference cost tracking. Analysis of what their Agentic Commerce Protocol provides and what additional infrastructure AI companies need.
AI Payment UX Patterns: What Current Systems Are Missing
An analysis of payment UX patterns in AI products from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. Examines spending visibility, cost predictability, and control mechanisms that affect user experience.
Why AI Pricing Should Work Like Uber, Not Like Parking Meters
Current AI payment systems charge per token like parking meters. We propose plan-based pricing that works like Uber: know the cost upfront, approve it, and pay for delivered value. Here is why this matters and where the market is headed.
HTTP 402 Payments: The Technical Reality Nobody Talks About
HTTP 402 Payment Required was designed for digital payments, but nobody uses it. L402 aims to fix that with Bitcoin Lightning. Here is why both fail for real users and what actually needs to exist for AI payment systems to work.
The True Cost of Running AI APIs: Complete 2025 Guide
Compare GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini pricing with real profitability calculations. See exact $/token costs, context window pricing, and margin analysis for AI SaaS startups.
From Flat-Rate to Usage-Based Pricing: A Step-by-Step Migration Guide
A structured approach to migrating from flat-rate to usage-based pricing. Includes customer communication templates, timeline recommendations, and lessons from AI product pricing changes.
GitHub Copilot Unit Economics: A $20/User Cost-to-Serve Analysis
GitHub Copilot charges $10/month with an estimated $30/user cost-to-serve. This case study analyzes the unit economics of AI-assisted coding products and pricing model implications.
Usage Variance in AI Products: Understanding Per-Customer Cost Distribution
In AI products, the top 10% of customers often generate 80% of API costs. This article analyzes per-customer cost variance, margin calculation by cohort, and pricing model options.
The Real Cost of Running an AI Product in 2025: $/Token Is Only 30% of Your Bill
API pricing is one component of total cost. Infrastructure costs (47-67% of budget), monitoring overhead, and true TCO make up the complete picture for AI margin calculations.