I think that you should just subscribe to a preset allotment of tokens at a certain price, or a base tier with incremental usage costs for models that aren’t tiny (like paid per minute “long distance calling”).
I use an LLM tool that shows the cost associated with each message/request and most are pennies each. There’s a point where the friction of paying is a disincentive to using it. Imagine you had to pay $0.01 every time you Google searched something? Most people would never use the product because trying to pay $0.30/mo for one day a month of usage is annoying. And no one would want to prepay and fund an account if you weren’t familiar with the product. No consumer likes micro transactions
No one wants to hear this, but the answer is advertising and it will change the game of LLMs. Once you can subsidize the lowest end usage, the incentive for businesses to offer these $20 subscriptions will change, and they’d charge per-usage rates for commercial users.
The problem is that there's no way to gauge or control token usage.
I have no idea why Claude Code wrote that it consumed X tokens now, and Y tokens later, and what to do about it
I'm a fan of having both a subscription and a usage based plan available. The subscription is effectively a built in spending limit. If I regularly hit it and need more value, I can switch to an API key for unlimited usage.
The downside is you are potentially paying for something you don't use, but that is the same for all subscription services.
But I have slow months and think that might not actually be the winner. Basically I'm going to wait and see before I sign up for auto-pay.
Maybe that reflects higher underlying costs. Maybe their API prices are just inflated.
you can already pay per token by giving Claude Code an API key, if you want.
thus, the subtext of every complaint on this thread is that people want "unlimited" and they want their particular use to be under whatever the cap is, and they want it to be cheap.
If I'm paying a flat rate, the only economic cost I am worrying about is "will this be faster than me doing it myself if it fails once or twice?"
If I am paying per token, and it goes off for 20 minutes without solving the problem, I've just spent $$ for no result. Why would I even bother using it?
For something like Claude Code, that's an even more concerning issue - how many background tasks have to fail before I reach my monthly spending limit? How do I get granular control to say "only spend 7 dollars on this task - stop if you cannot succeed." - and I have to write my own accounting system for whether it succeeds or fails.
Mask off completely and just make it completely usage based for everyone. You could do something for trial users like first 20 (pick your number here) requests are free if you really need to in order to get people on board. Or you could do tiered pricing like first 20 free, next 200 for X rate, next 200 for X*1.25 rate, and then for really high usage users charge the full cost to make up for their extreme patterns. With this they can still subsidize for the people who stay lower on usage rates for market share. Of course you can replace 200 requests with just token usage if that makes sense but I'm sure they can do the math to make it work with request limits if they work hard enough.
Offer better than open-router pricing and that keeps people in your system instead of reaching for 3rd party tools.
If your tool is that good, even with usage based it will get users. The issue is all the providers are both subsidizing users to get market share, but also trying to prohibit bad actors and the most egregious usage patterns. The only way this 100% becomes a non-issue is usage based for everything with no entry fee.
But this also hurts some who pay a subscription but DONT use enough to account for the usage based fees. So some sales people probably don't like that option either. It also makes it easier for people to shop around instead of feeling stuck for a month or two since most people don't want multiple subs at once.