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?
A broken pricing paradigm
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...
What's Driving Token Prices? January 14, 2026
This week on What’s Driving Token Prices, Katie Talati examines Zcash governance issues, Polygon’s payments shift, and planned changes at Pump.fun.
AI Benefits - But at What Cost?
In 2026 we can all agree that AI and agentic development are certainly exciting topics which many see yielding great productivity gains. But as the investor-subsidized pricing of these services gives way to realistic and profitable business models, where will the real costs land?
Cryptocurrency 'market caps' and notional value
A naive equation works well when estimating the value of small quantities of popular crypto tokens, but it's also being used to estimate values of illiquid tokens and the market capitalization of all of crypto. Journalists are publishing misinformation and uncritically repeating these figures, helping to prop up the belief that crypto is a far larger industry than in reality.
tokens are getting more expensive
"language models will get cheaper by 10x" will not save ai subscriptions from the short squeeze
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.
Pricing Your Product
A lot of startups treat pricing as a math problem or, worse, an afterthought. Pricing is as much an art as it is a science, one that relies as much on marketing and psychology as it does on classical economics.
Simple Pricing | Machine Learning Infrastructure | Deep Infra
We provide only pay-what-you-use pricing with no long-term contracts or upfront costs for our machine learning models and infrastructure. Learn more!
On the immaturity of tokenized value capture mechanisms
Pursuing value in an age of borderless-ness, experimental monetary policies, costless forks and unlimited innovation.
How to Price Effectively: A Guide for Managers and Entr…
Pricing decisions are among the most important and impa…
Principles of Pricing | SaaS Pricing Strategy Frameworks
Practical frameworks to build a best-in-class pricing strategy for B2B SaaS and Cloud businesses: packaging, price metrics, price levels and more.
How to Develop An AI Pricing Model | Salesforce Ventures
Your guide to developing an effective and scalable AI pricing strategy.
Labor-Value Commodity Chains: The Hidden Abode of Global Production - Monthly Review
Intan Suwandi is a frequent contributor to Monthly Review. This article is adapted from her book, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy-Paul A.... READ MORE
