kalen@jordan:~/writing$ cat ai-subscriptions-make-good-ai-products-harder-to-sell.md

AI Subscriptions Make Good AI Products Harder to Sell

One weird consequence of the heavily subsidized AI subscription plans is that they disincentivize certain kinds of innovation.

I’m not complaining. Paying API prices for the amount of AI I use would be absolutely brutal. And I love that the subscriptions make it cheap enough to build my own apps. I’ve been doing a ton of that.

But they also distort the build-versus-buy decision.

If my subscription usage cost the same as API usage, and someone else had already built a good solution to a problem, it would probably make more sense to use their product than to build my own.

Instead, I already have this giant bucket of subsidized usage. So even if somebody has built exactly what I need, using their product means paying for AI again while leaving my subscription quota unused.

The same thing happens with tools that let you bring your own API key. In theory that should be a great middle ground. In practice, I don’t want to pay API prices while I still have subscription quota available.

So the economics keep nudging me toward building everything myself.

I’ve been seeing this firsthand while doing outbound for Yedric: https://www.yedric.app/

It lets Shopify apps embed a support agent that can answer questions and take actions inside the app.

I genuinely think the ShopPad team has done a more thorough job of integrating those actions into a support agent in the Shopify app context than most teams would do themselves. I could be wrong, but that’s my sense from the early feedback I’ve gotten and from what Aaron showed me.

And it’s still a tough sell right now. Even if Yedric is better than what a team would build internally, the person on the other end already has a giant bucket of subsidized AI usage and increasingly capable tools for building things themselves. The incentive structure is distorted before they even evaluate the product.

That’s great for individual experimentation. But it’s a pretty strange incentive for the ecosystem. The companies making AI cheap enough for everyone to build software are also making it harder for the people building that software to charge anyone else for it.