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I think it would be impossible to find the price point for a monthly subscribtion that would both be profitable to a provider, as well as attractive to the cust

by _flux 6mo ago

I think it would be impossible to find the price point for a monthly subscribtion that would both be profitable to a provider, as well as attractive to the customer. If anything, as the customers would now be paying necessarily even a higher amount for agentic use, they'd make certain they'd be using the agent as effectively as they can, meaning it would be even more costly for the provider. Pay-per-token is really the only way it can work. If some kind of fixed monthly price is desirable, then there should be a quota the user can assign, and then the agent could e.g. slow itself down by 50% when 50% of the quota is spent, another 50% at 75%, etc, to make it last longer.. As a side thought, I wonder how it could affect an agent's behavior if the information of this token usage/limit was brought to it..

jimkleiber 6mo ago
Ironically in chatting with Gemini, helped me realize that telecoms have often solved this problem of unlimited usage with rate/speed limiting. If one goes over 10GB or whatnot of data, then the speed drops from 5G to 3G, and data remains unlimited. I wonder if there could be something like that, maybe even a progressive rate limiting, where after a certain number of tokens or another metric of use, then the speed slows down a LOT. Not saying that I would love that as a consumer, as I'd prefer this all-you-can eat, unlimited data plan, but I wonder if that would be a compromise that could work, as it seems to have worked OK with the telecom space. edit: the nerd in me loves the irony of me making the above comment and then later seeing your username as flux :-)