Bilkowski: AI tools will adopt baseline platform fees with token overages
Dan Bilkowski · Value Lives in the Mind of the Customer, Not in Your Product · Oct 21, 2025 · at 22:37
Dan Bilkowski, founder of Product Tranquility, discusses how AI application providers and intermediaries will transition their pricing models away from strict hard usage limits.
0:00 / 0:25exact quote · 25.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Something like, say, a cursor or a lovable is a, you know, intermediary between you and these models. Likely what will happen is some sort of baseline platform fee, and then what looks like a added, added value cost per token on top of that that's fluctuating.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dan Bilkowski
Bilkowski: SaaS companies should never charge customers per token
“So now I'm also going to chart besides per seat, you know, charging you dollars per seat, but now I'm also going to charge you per token. This is a no, no. I call this showing your customers your underpants. You don't want to show your customers your underpant…”
Bilkowski: Premium AI plans are a no-brainer by replacing junior software developers
“And that can be, you know, if you're, you know, if your business is relying on it may be a no brainer because you're like, Hey, we're, I'm using this to write code, that code I'm able to sell for, you know, 10, 20 X, whatever I'm paying, you know, open AI. And…”
Bilkowski: Google can lose money on AI indefinitely to pressure rivals
“They could lose money on their AI, like basically indefinitely. They could run the clock out on everyone else if they really wanted to, you know, keep pricing pressure on the market and run those other companies out of business because they can fund that type …”
Bilkowski: Microsoft Copilot's value fell short of its pricing promise
“Turns out that the capabilities weren't quite there. And so I think that the, you know, the promise of the value was greater than what the realization was.”
Bilkowski: AI features introduce significant variable costs to traditional SaaS economics
“For the longest time, the incremental cost of serving an additional customer has been net negligible, effectively zero for AWS storage network and compute. And so now companies, as they're building in AI enabled capabilities into their platforms are seeing sig…”
Bilkowski: SaaS companies fail to charge premium prices due to baseline anchoring
“Those companies are often anchored to what they have in market today, and very rarely are they willing to even consider, oh, maybe someone would be out there who would pay a hundred bucks per seat, but that's very much what can happen when you start to look at…”