Monetising artificial intelligence applications
How pricing works + 3 strategies to make money
1. Pay as you go
2. Credits
3. Monthly subscription
Firstly, how pricing works - tokens.
Tokens can be considered as segments of language utilized in natural language processing. In English text, a single token equates to approximately 0.75 words or 4 characters, which means that 100 tokens correspond to roughly 75 words.
Cost projections
Each model has a different cost. For example:
Davinci - $0.1200 / 1K tokens
Ada - $0.0016 / 1K tokens
By understanding how many monthly users you may have, how many requests they may make a month, an estimate on the tokens per request you can forecast cost
Monetisation
Pay-as-you-go
This is by far the simplest, users upload input and pay to get the output.
An example is Lensa AI, Users upload 10 to 20 selfies to the app and for $7.99 Lensa will create a pack of 50 images, with various art styles and backgrounds.
Credits
This involves users paying to get limited access based on how many credits they've bought to use your application.
An example here is Dall E 2
1 credit – 4 images
For the first month you get 50 free credits
Additional credits packs are $15 for 115 credits
Monthly subscription
Similar to SaaS model, you provide users access to your application in exchange for a monthly fee.
An example of this is midjourney, for $30 a month you can generate AI images with fast GPU time for 15 hr/month.
Similar to the NFT/Blockchain wave, artificial intelligence integrated solutions have seen a wave of interest.
For educational purposes, building an application can be a fun experience but you may want to think about monetisation sooner rather than later.