The real problem is subscription models. Businesses want recurring revenue so they try to game the ratio of fixed subscription prices to COGS but it's always a game and so whoever can figure out the upside for the company can figure out the complementary upside for themselves.
How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation. You could forbid "using tokens for the benefit of more than the human who signed up" but then what do families (especially with kids) need to do? What if your friend asks you a question and you turn to a chat model? Forbidding "reselling" tokens outside of a household sounds like the closest terms but that's leaky for anyone who travels a lot, etc.
Fixed cost per token simply works.
The abuse is factored in to pricing and quota structure.
I have some past experience with subscription plans for a much less interesting product. Abuse is inevitable. As you do your math on the subscription costs you look at the actual usage across all accounts, which includes the abuse.
Cleaning up abuse was still a priority because it meant we could give more service to the real customers. It's a frustrating battle because you actually want to give good service to the real customers, but you also want to let each account do as they please with their susbcription. That latter priority probably fades fast for something like an LLM company when you discover that the abuse has become automated and is scaling up so fast that it's tilting the math toward degrading service for everyone.
> Fixed cost per token simply works.
As a consumer, I benefit greatly from the subscription rates. There's a lot of grumbling about how they should go to fixed token for everyone but I'm over hear happy with the subscription plan offerings while they last.
Tokens are becoming a hard commodity. Subscriptions don’t work with hard commodities. Subscriptions work fine where fixed costs/capital investment are massive and service delivery is negligible. Think car washes and Netflix. The marginal cost of adding an additional subscriber to a streaming platform or a monthly car was membership is negligible. While there was substantial capital investment to generate the models, we are learning that the service delivery cost of tokens is real.
There is a reason the Max plan gets only so few Fable tokens per week.
Subscription models are fine if profitable individually. It then is an automated token allocation.
The problem is loss making subscription as a marketing tool. But if you do loss leaders that be the risk you take.
> How would one even word a bulletproof subscription contract for agentic tokens, anyway? You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation. You could forbid "using tokens for the benefit of more than the human who signed up" but then what do families (especially with kids) need to do? What if your friend asks you a question and you turn to a chat model? Forbidding "reselling" tokens outside of a household sounds like the closest terms but that's leaky for anyone who travels a lot, etc.
reverse the pricing structure; give modest discount once you go over certain amount of tokens, then you are incentivized NOT to start multiple accounts.
require first few transactions to be pre-paid to get around at least some of the card problems.
Of course, that would fuck over subsidized plans, but I don't see any option to keep them if you want to avoid the flood
> You can't forbid automation because sub-agents are automation.
Is this some kind of attempt to make the other side look better by making the worst argument you can?
....ask the original poster not me ? I just quoted him