I Refused to Sell Tokens. Here Is What the Credit Economy Is Hiding From Enterprise Buyers.

En bref : AI credits let vendors pass their own cost uncertainty to customers, and a vendor who keeps that risk builds a better product, so enterprise buyers should contract the completed action instead.

I have sat on both sides of this pricing page

For five years I ran digital excellence for a global pharmaceutical company out of Switzerland. Part of that job was buying software: platforms for field teams, content engines, analytics, the whole stack a commercial organisation runs on. I learned to read a pricing page the way a procurement officer reads it, which means I learned to look for the sentence that tells me what next year costs. Seats told me. Storage told me. Transactions told me. I could put a number in a budget, defend it in front of a finance committee, and be roughly right twelve months later.

Now I run Kainjoo, and we build and license artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to the kind of companies I used to work for. So when Elena Verna, who leads growth at Lovable, published her teardown of AI pricing pages this week and admitted that she, a pricing specialist inside an AI company, could not tell what 20 dollars a month buys¹, I read it twice. Once as a buyer, nodding. Once as a vendor, wincing, because I know exactly why the pages look the way they do.