Are traditional monthly subscription models becoming a thing of the past? That may very well be the case, and we have AI to thank (or blame). According to Business Insider, more and more players within the SaaS industry are ditching traditional fixed “per-seat” subscription models in favor of a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Pay-as-you-go? This model shifts away from a flat user rate to a consumption-based billing that tracks actual system engagement. Instead of just charging you for using their service, you’ll be charged on how much you use it — how many tasks you run and which features you access will determine the price tag.

Why? Software services are computing beasts that cost a pretty penny to run, and a flat monthly rate doesn’t cover it. Feeling the heat (literally) is the AI industry. With a slew of advanced models — such as Grok-3, GPT-4o, and Claude Sonnet — infiltrating the market with each passing day, AI is no longer just simply responding to queries, it’s dissecting and analysing them through an “inference-time computing” approach — a process that sees the model break down the user’s request into miniscule “slices,” according to BI.

Let’s talk numbers. So how much on average does a single query on OpenAI’s most advanced model cost the company? “Around USD 3.5k,” writes Tech Analyst Alistair Barr. OpenAI’s most advanced model uses 1k times more tokens — units of text that AI models use to understand and process language — than its no-cost counterpart. So how do you keep up with the costs? For a rising number of tech companies, it’s a simple fix — ditch the monthly payment models, and charge by activity, whether that be the amount of tokens used, the number of queries run, or just how much time you spend thanking your digital best friend.

Last month, Altman took to X (formerly Twitter) to present the idea to the public. “An idea for paid plans: your [USD 20] plus subscription converts to credits you can use across features like deep research, o1, gpt-4.5, sora, etc. No fixed limits per feature and you choose what you want; if you run out of credits you can buy more. What do you think? good/bad?” Early adopters of this model — whether or not inspired by Altman — are AI company Replit, Bolt.New, an AI-Powered web development platform, and US cloud services platform Vercel.

The good, the bad… Should you decide to “subscribe” to a premium AI model sometime in the near-future, you might just have to learn to be a little bit frugal. Soon enough, you’ll be paying for tokens and not full unbridled access to the model — and these tokens are quick to run out. The good? You can always top up, which is definitely better for the companies than it is for you, but isn’t that the price of innovation? Or is it just a glorified in-app purchase?

… and the ugly. You might have to stop thanking your virtual genie to conserve on tokens, which may not bother the average user. But the more paranoid of us expect consequences that are hard to predict… until the AI models start gaining consciousness.

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