Elena Verna · 10 min read · Product Strategy
What on earth is going on with AI pricing and packaging?
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The author explores the confusing state of AI product pricing, noting that companies use vague metrics like tokens, credits, and usage multipliers without clearly defining what customers actually get. Despite this opacity, AI companies continue to see explosive growth and high valuations, suggesting early adopters tolerate pricing confusion for sufficiently compelling products. The author candidly includes their own company, Lovable, as an example of the same pricing clarity problem.
Key Takeaways
- AI pricing pages commonly use undefined metrics—tokens, credits, and relative usage multipliers—that leave customers unable to understand what they're actually purchasing
- Companies like Grok advertise '4x more usage' or '15x more usage' without ever defining the baseline amount of usage included in base plans
- Some AI companies have abandoned traditional pricing pages altogether, making pricing a post-login or community-sourced discovery
- AI products are uniquely difficult to price because the cost and scope of work varies wildly and neither customers nor companies can reliably predict usage
- Current market success despite pricing opacity is likely unsustainable—early adopters tolerate ambiguity, but mainstream adoption may require much greater transparency
Excerpt
I recently went down a rabbit hole looking at AI pricing pages, trying to answer what I thought was a pretty basic question: If I pay $20 a month for an AI product, what exactly am I getting? How much can I use it? And how do I know if I need the $20 plan, the $100 plan, or the “contact sales and surrender your firstborn” plan? I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my career obsessing over pricing and packaging and most importantly I work for an AI company, so I assumed I could figure this out. Turns out, I…