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.
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.
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.
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.