It’s a race to the bottom, and the bottom is unlimited use for a flat monthly rate.
Granular pricing (tokens, minutes, etc) is pretty anti-customer generates less revenue than customer value-based subscriptions (why SaaS is such a good business model)
But my Claude Max subscription? If I have any of my limit left the day of my reset, I’ll go and fire off research workflows with a bunch of parallel agents to explore whatever dumb ideas I had the past week. And there’s a 50:50 chance I’ll forget about it and never read the output.
I am however going to fire off a half assed prompt when the marginal cost is zero, even if I don’t use it (which is par for the course, I probably throw out two thirds of anything the AI writes anyway be it code or prose).
Any experience with it?
Consumers don’t generally get usage-based pricing because of the inconvenience and unpredictability, but B2B SaaS products utilize usage-based pricing all the time.
Pricing software is a game of estimating both software value and the purchasing power for customers. Only the latter might have any available data and even then it won’t be sliced the right way for any in depth statistical analysis that an actuary would perform to underwrite risk.
It’s much more traditionally a more salesperson like background where being in the target market or having strong connections to it dominates efficacy.
More on my approach here: Https://forstarters.substack.com