Ask HN: Is token-based pricing making AI harder to use in production?
2 pointsby Barathkanna5 hours ago1 comment
  • iamrobertismo5 hours ago
    Not clear what you are pitching, if you don't control the infrastructure or have a major contract, how exactly are you lowering or stabilizing costs. Especially if you are not chasing the newest model, at this point token economics is essentially a commodity. Commodity pricing is not a engineering problem, it is a financing problem.
    • Barathkanna4 hours ago
      That’s fair, and I probably didn’t explain it clearly. We’re building an AI API as a service platform aimed at early developers and small teams who want to integrate AI without constantly thinking about tokens at all.

      I agree that token economics are basically a commodity today. The problem we’re trying to address isn’t beating the market on raw token prices, but removing the mental and financial overhead of having to model usage, estimate burn, and worry about runaway costs while experimenting or shipping early features. In that sense it’s absolutely an engineering and finance problem combined, and we’re intentionally tackling it at the pricing and API layer rather than pretending the underlying models are unique.

      • iamrobertismo23 minutes ago
        Would you just be... subsidizing low volume users? I am saying this isn't like a new problem in the grand scheme of things. hopefully I am not being too negative, do you have a site or something to learn more? It's not clear how you can have better token economics to provide me or someone else better token economics, rather than just burning more money lol.