AI Agents, Monetization, Billing, and CUDA – Arnon’s blog
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The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
Content is infinite and free now. Trust isn’t. We’re abandoning digital channels entirely because we can’t tell what’s real anymore. -
Notes on where seat-based pricing is going
Everyone (mostly me) keeps saying seat pricing is dead, and some people are arguing with me online. I think that’s cool, but it’s because they don’t understand why it’s dying. For twenty years, SaaS revenue scaled with headcount.More humans = more seats.That logic held so long that we stopped questioning it. Then the humans disappeared.… -
MIT’s 95% AI failure rate is wrong
The MIT NANDA report claiming 95% of AI projects fail is making rounds on LinkedIn. Everyone’s sharing it like it’s gospel. Has anyone actually read the methodology? They interviewed 52 organizations. That’s their entire sample. We’ve worked with over 250 companies at Paid, and the reality looks completely different. The flaw in their math MIT…
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The free tier death cult
One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. That’s from Anthropic’s own admission when they killed Claude Code’s unlimited tier. Not $200 worth of usage. Tens of thousands of dollars on a $200/month plan. TechCrunch said Cursor hit $500 million ARR. Fastest growing application ever, but still losing money on…
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The SaaS pricing apocalypse
You know that feeling when you’re looking at your competitor’s pricing page and the math doesn’t add up? $9/month. Unlimited usage. Same features as your $900 enterprise plan. Your first thought: They’re burning VC money. Classic Silicon Valley playbook – grow at all costs, figure out margins later. You’ve seen this movie before. They’ll either…
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The 5 stages of SaaS death
Last week, I met a founder who’d just lost a pretty big $2M deal to a 3-person startup with a half-finished product (I call these “3 Stanford grads in a trenchcoat”). He was annoyed they didn’t even have a basic dashboard or settings page. I think he wasn’t angry about losing the deal, but mostly…
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Pricing AI Proofs-of-Concept: free pilots will kill you
You know that sinking feeling when a “promising” proof of concept drags on for months, burns through your engineering resources, and ends with “we need more time to evaluate”? Yeah. That’s the PoC death spiral. And I’m seeing so many agentic companies falling into this trap as we help them monetize their agents at Paid.…
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🐙 The 14 pains of billing for AI agents
(Basically, why the octopus grew new tentacles for agentic billing) A while ago, I wrote about the 14 pains of building your own billing system – that was back when billing was “just” complicated. It got mentioned quite a bit around the internet, and ended up #2 on the front page of Hacker News which…
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How we built a mini podcasting studio for under $10,000
The podcast setup at Get Paid was upgraded, focusing on quality and budget-friendly equipment for both remote and in-person interviews. Key choices included the Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 for video, Shure MV7+ microphones for audio, and an organized storage solution. Comfort in the studio environment also significantly enhances interview quality.
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🤔🔍 B2C billing is actually harder than B2B billing
We all love a B2B SaaS ❤️. A few months ago I wrote about 14 reasons why building your own billing system (mostly for B2B SaaS) is hard. Here are 6 more so that we can round it up to a nice 20! While we all really do love a B2B, we often neglect to…