







A token is not a fixed unit of cost Variance in usage creates an interconnected pricing and scaling issue Anjali Shrivastava anjali.shrivastava99@gmail.com | @anjali_shriva THIS ESSAY IS NOW LIVE! A token is not a fixed unit of cost PART I: High variance in AI demand breaks unit economics and re...

tokens are getting more expensive
"language models will get cheaper by 10x" will not save ai subscriptions from the short squeeze

Ways to think about token pricing — Benedict Evans
AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?

Models & Pricing | DeepSeek API Docs
The prices listed below are in units of per 1M tokens. A token, the smallest unit of text that the model recognizes, can be a word, a number, or even a punctuation mark. We will bill based on the total number of input and output tokens by the model.

Perspective: AI demand is inflated, and only Anthropic is being realistic
The main usage metric for artificial intelligence, called tokens, looks explosive on paper, but it may be significantly overstated.

How to Price Effectively: A Guide for Managers and Entr…
Pricing decisions are among the most important and impa…

How to Develop An AI Pricing Model | Salesforce Ventures
Your guide to developing an effective and scalable AI pricing strategy.

Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds via @ConsumerReports
Exclusive: Instacart’s AI pricing may be inflating your grocery bill.
The Ads Model for Prompts Vertically Integrates AI
Meta's dual-tier AI pricing introduces an explicit barter : a 92% discount on inference in exchange for your data. Applying Michael Mauboussin's insight that prices contain information reveals the clearing price of prompt data : $1.24 per million tokens.
Inside Design Tokens: Put your Tokens on a Scale
Ever worked with a set of design tokens that are super inconsistent and hardly distinguishable? Perhaps a wrong scale? This article explains the available scales, their problems and what to use them for.
Developer AI Token Costs Could Exceed Their Salaries in Two Years - Slashdot
"Enterprises may soon be paying as much for their developers' AI token usage as they do for their salaries," writes InfoWorld: According to Gartner, these costs will meet, or even exceed, the typical software engineer's monthly salary within the next two years. This is not only because developers ...

SaaS Pricing: Lessons from 4 pricing changes - Canny Blog
We launched Canny almost a year ago. During that time, we reached ramen profitability. We also changed our pricing four times. Here's a deep dive into each pricing change and the lessons we learned.

Dynamic Pricing: What It Is & Why It's Important | HBS Online
Are you reevaluating your digital platform’s pricing model? Here’s an overview of dynamic pricing and why it’s important to your business.
Jev: Fable-level model that doesn’t charge for output tokens because they’re too cheap to meter it’s not general though, it only makes decisions, doesn’t generate text, but input tokens are measured by the billion ($42/btok) typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-m…

AI 'surveillance pricing' under scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers

Canada Has a Precedent to Regulate Surveillance Pricing
Instacart’s AI-Enabled Pricing Experiments May Be Inflating Your Grocery Bill, CR and Groundwork Collaborative Investigation Finds via @ConsumerReports
Kroger Stores Overcharging Shoppers on Sale Items, CR Price Check Finds via @ConsumerReports
Different Prices for the Same Ride: How Uber and Lyft Use AI to Get More Money Out of You via @ConsumerReports