In short
If you sell value, price for value. Don’t sell (just) credits.
No, you don't have to price your AI in credits. And you probably should not.
I talked to 5 B2B founders in the past few days. Different industries, same conversation: "we're moving to credits."
Why? Because it's trendy... Because GPT and Claude taught us to count tokens...
But you're not Claude!
Credits make sense when:
- Your variable cost per use is genuinely high
- You don't yet know who values what, and need usage data and feedback to learn
Credits are a (big) trap when:
- Your value massively exceeds the cost of a credit (most B2B AI today)
- Your buyers want a predictable budget (still most B2B today - just ask your clients)
- The value clients get out of your solution is not (just) correlated to their usage of credits
The cost of getting this wrong? You've capped your ARPU at the price of an API call. And 6 months in, you wonder why margins don't expand with adoption.
If you sell value, price for value. Don't sell (just) credits.
Claire Chokron
Pricing and monetization strategist, founder of Mida.