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You are not a model. Don’t price per token.

a16z News

Aug 27, 2026

8/27/2026

Bill For Completed Work With Transparent Usage Reports Instead Of Token-Based Billing

You are not a model. Don’t price per token. · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Aug 27, 2026

The article argues that customers need token-level usage visibility for comparison, budgeting, and chargebacks, but token counts are a poor default billing unit because they create false precision and make forecasting difficult. It recommends billing for completed work or value while reporting technical resource use transparently, with token pass-through reserved for specialized, volatile, or highly competitive contexts.


8/27/2026

Value Based Credits Decouple Customer Payments From Variable AI Delivery Costs To Protect Margins And Preserve Providers Upside

You are not a model. Don’t price per token. · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Aug 27, 2026

Value-based AI credits decouple customer pricing from variable delivery costs, helping applications protect margins and retain the benefits of efficiency improvements; Clay illustrates this with separate data and orchestration credits plus pass-through pricing for costly reasoning-model tokens.


8/27/2026

Credits Should Be A Flexible, Understandable Currency That Translates AI Work Into Clear Effort Bands For Procurement Across Workloads

You are not a model. Don’t price per token. · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Aug 27, 2026

Credits work best as a customer-understandable currency for pricing variable AI work by recognizable effort bands, not as an opaque proxy for compute; they are especially useful when applications deliver valuable work without owning the final business outcome.


8/27/2026

AI Application Pricing Should Be Based On Recognizable Work Units And Outcomes Rather Than Model Token Usage

You are not a model. Don’t price per token. · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Aug 27, 2026

AI applications should price at the highest reliably measurable layer of customer value—recognizable work units or business outcomes—rather than passing through declining model-token costs. Credits tied to completed work were preferred over token pricing by surveyed technical buyers, supporting category-specific meters such as briefs, implemented code changes, completed queries, pipelines, or agent runs.