P.S. Get a full free year of Google AI, Cursor, Lovable, Notion, Manus, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Canva, ElevenLabs, Factory, Wispr Flow, Fin, Supabase, Bolt, Linear, PostHog, Framer, Railway, Granola, Warp, Gumloop, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, Stripe Atlas, and ChatPRD, by becoming an Insider subscriber. Yes, this is for real.
Today’s guest author, Vikas Kansal, leads product for Google AI, arguably the most successful consumer subscription bundle in history, with Gemini 3.1, Nano Banana, NotebookLM, Veo3, and terabytes (!) of cloud storage. Vikas has been on the front lines of figuring out how to successfully monetize AI products, balancing compute costs with sustainable growth, and in today’s in-depth guest post, he shares all the lessons he and his team have learned about paywalling AI.
Let’s get into it.
You’ve just launched an incredible AI product. Growth is exploding, and users are completely hooked on the “magic” of your free tier. Then your bills arrive. In traditional SaaS, serving an extra free user costs essentially zero. In AI, every time a free user hits “Enter,” your GPUs fire, and your cash burns. AI products need to figure out monetization quickly, or compute costs will bankrupt your company.
