Aditya Sonkar

About

Product builder and former tech startup co-founder with 10+ years across product, consulting, and business development. Passionate about building scalable, customer-obsessed products that solve real problems. Now building Paygent, monetization and billing infrastructure purpose-built for AI agent companies. If you're building on AI and struggling to price your product or track what it actually costs to serve a customer, that's exactly the problem we solve. Always happy to talk AI, startups, or the economics of building in the agent era.

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Aditya Sonkar

25d ago

10 years of building and Why I'm going all in on AI Agent Monetization

Hey Product Hunt I'm Aditya.

Started my career as a consultant. Suits, CXO calls, global clients. Good money, zero soul. Three years of that and I knew it wasn't it.

So I quit and built RevMeUp from scratch. A social review platform. Spent 2 years getting it to 120K+ users, 50 person team, 1000+ reviews a day. Learned everything the hard way. Unit economics, hiring, product, distribution. All of it.

Then it ended. Joined Monster as a PM. Then Guidepoint where I got to work on some genuinely exciting AI stuff. Built ByteMe on the side because I had FOMO and honestly just needed to keep building something.

Why is pricing AI agents so much harder than traditional SaaS?

We've been talking to dozens of AI agent founders over the past few months and one thing keeps coming up, only few actually knows what it costs them to serve a single customer.

With traditional SaaS it's simple. Seat-based pricing, predictable infra costs, clean unit economics.

With AI agents it's a completely different beast. You've got LLM tokens, voice minutes, vector DB queries, tool calls, cloud compute. All variable, all billed separately, none of it tied to a specific customer or workflow.

You get a monthly invoice from 5 different vendors. You make a guess. And you find out months later you've been losing money on your best customers. Even OpenAI itself uses Metronome just to handle ChatGPT's billing complexity.

Forget everything else. This one metric saved our product.

We were drowning in data. Page views. Session duration. Bounce rate. Time on site. New users. Returning users. Feature adoption. Support tickets. NPS scores.

None of it told us who was about to leave.

We had retention data. We had churn data. But it was backwards. You only knew someone churned after they cancelled. By then, it was too late.

So we looked for a leading indicator. One metric that predicted churn before it happened.

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