Startup land rewards motion. Announcements, launches, funding headlines, feature drops - it all looks like acceleration.
But visible activity isn t the same as real progress.
Shipping fast doesn t mean you re building the right thing. Raising capital doesn t mean you found product-market fit. Talking about scale doesn t mean you solved anything painful.
A lot of ecosystems reward velocity because it s easy to measure. Markets reward outcomes because they re impossible to fake.
Subscription pricing struggles when value is variable. Pure usage pricing is accurate, but messy to explain, messy to predict, and easy to hate when the bill surprises you.
Credit-based pricing sits in the middle:
Simple for customers: I bought 10,000 credits
Flexible for teams: bundle tokens, GPU time, storage, calls into one unit
Better for finance: prepaid revenue, clearer burn, fewer billing shocks
Better for product: you can experiment with packaging without rebuilding billing every time
The bigger trend is this: We re moving from pricing as a plan to pricing as a runtime.
If I want to remove one company, I remove it everywhere. If I pause outreach, I double-check multiple tools to make sure nothing accidentally goes out.