AI pricing is way harder than SaaS pricing. What are people actually seeing work?
The more AI products I look at, the more it seems like traditional SaaS pricing breaks down pretty quickly.
A flat subscription sounds great until one customer costs $2/month and another costs $200/month in API usage.
I've seen teams experimenting with:
- credits
- usage-based billing
- prepaid balances
- top-ups
- hybrid subscription + credits models
The surprising part is that pricing itself often seems easier than the infrastructure around it.
Tracking usage correctly.
Preventing abuse.
Keeping billing state synchronized.
Handling retries and failed payments.
For those building AI products today:
What pricing model are you actually using in production?
And if you changed models, what pushed you to change?
u/Distinct-Orchid-7742 — 2 days ago