Round-up!: Thinking Machines are Expensive Now?
Stories from the Pricing, Monetization, and Data Science world from the past week (2026-05-15)
This was a strong week for pricing news, so I’m leaning into it with a round of a few choice pricing/monetization/data/statistics stories from the week. Maybe it’ll be a recurring thing (actually recurring, not “recurring” as in ARR).
Some Anthropic customers don’t like its pricing. I heard not so long ago that AI was ending scarcity and replacing white collar work by 2030 at the latest. Now, even the Silicon Gods have a price, and some folks think it is too much. Just imagine if the robots cost more than our glorified address book! That’s the contradiction of LLMs. They’re fantastic products—amazing, in fact, but if they were as good as the AI labs’ frontmen say… they’d cost more. They’re more than worth it at current prices, of course. “Many technology firms and other large Anthropic customers say they plan to eat the soaring costs...” Price competition is tough because of relatively low product differentiation between the top players, which should keep prices down… but even Google can’t light money on fire forever...
Speaking of the cool, currently cheap-enough AI… I haven’t had the chance to play around with it yet, but the demos of Hex’s new “generative apps” look snazzy. If you don’t know Hex, it’s a notebook ala Jupyter that makes it easy to spin up web apps powered by the notebook for your stakeholders’ consumption. It’s well-done, and the stylings of these new vibes-powered apps look fun.
Spotify is running this hilarious monetization play. If you open Spotify in the browser and switch tabs, the miniplayer pops up in the lower-right. If you are not on Spotify Premium, like me, it shows the miniplayer covered with a prompt reading, “You discovered a Premium feature. With Spotify Premium, you can make the miniplayer even smaller.” I had never noticed the size of the miniplayer before. It had never occurred to me that it was too big, but after I clicked “Not Now” and the player ballooned to its previously normal size, I saw how large it truly was. Like Adam in the Garden, I had tasted the fruit of a properly-sized miniplayer, and lost my innocence. I felt a sense of loss of what was once and what could be again… if only I didn’t refuse to pay $120/yr or whatever Spotify Premium is. I don’t mind ads. It’s nice to know what the fellow corporates are up to.
Seriously, a very clever surface to drive conversion on. I love it. I bet it works.
Slowly but surely, AI app pricing is matching the AI cost model. In the long run, cost structure sets pricing. Take Figma, for instance. They started capping how much customers can chatter with the Clankers for a flat rate, like the old cell phone plans. Now, you buy credits on top of the seat price once you cross a certain usage threshold. This always had to be the case, eventually. It’s not just Figma, of course.
These rectangles sold for $85.8 million, so next time, Just Monetize It (tm). Someone will buy it.
The Information owes me a referral fee for dominating the links, but they had great stories this week. Nice job, folks!
Blog and Side Projects Updates
Crossed 100 subscribers this week. Super-Neat! Hope you enjoy reading!
Completed our first full week of the new, thrice-weekly posting schedule! I want to write well, and it turns out you have to practice. Go figure.
We made a small chunk of progress on the last main project area for my secret side project (a webapp for this Common Statistical Task). We got to write some Stan for the first time in a while.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn