AI pricing is a mess.
Companies are changing their pricing every six months. Buyers don’t know what they’ll pay, how to budget, or whether all the AI being stuffed into products is creating enough value to justify the cost.
What’s going on?
The market is moving away from traditional seat-based pricing toward usage- and outcome-based models. But we’re stuck in the messy transition: companies are changing their products and business models simultaneously, while customers are being asked to absorb unfamiliar, and often unpredictable, ways of paying.
I’ve been working to figure this out, because we’re launching Candor, a synthetic user research product we’re building at Highline Beta, and we need a business model. That means instrumenting the real costs, researching the market, building a model and putting it in front of potential customers.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far…
