Every pricing model for an AI product is an answer to one question: who absorbs the variance in usage. There are only four answers, and each one has a margin curve you can write down.
The problem all four are solving
Traditional software has fixed cost and zero marginal cost, so a flat subscription is nearly risk-free: a customer who uses the product ten times more costs you nothing extra and is simply a happier customer. Inference breaks that. The tenth-percentile and ninety-ninth-percentile users of the same plan can differ by two orders of magnitude in what they cost to serve, and the pricing model decides who carries that.
Throughout, R is revenue per user per period, u is requests per user per period and c is your fully loaded variable cost per request, from the unit-economics model.
Seats: margin falls as the product succeeds
