Questions · Published
How should I price an AI app?
TL;DR
Charge a monthly subscription that includes a set amount of AI use, and let your busiest customers buy more. Count the allowance in something customers understand, like reports or documents. Before you pick the numbers, work out what the AI costs you for each customer, because a busy customer can cost you many times more than a quiet one.
Pricing an app that uses AI is mostly like pricing any other software: charge for the outcome your customer gets, and put a price in front of people early. The difference is cost. With ordinary software, one more customer costs you almost nothing. With AI, every request your app makes to a model costs you money, so a customer who uses it all day costs far more than one who logs in twice a month.
The common pattern: a subscription with an allowance
Most AI products now charge a monthly fee that includes a set amount of use, with a way to buy more. As of October 2026:
- ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro are $20 a month, with usage limits behind the scenes.
- Lovable is $25 a month for 100 credits, and customers can top up.
- Runway, which generates video, sells plans from $15 a month with a monthly allowance of credits.
- Intercom's Fin, an AI support agent, charges $0.99 for each conversation it resolves.
The surveys point the same way. Orb found that 95% of the 80 AI agent companies it studied combine more than one way of charging, and in an earlier Stripe survey of AI companies, 56% used a mix of subscription and usage. The subscription gives you predictable income. The allowance stops your busiest customers costing more than they pay.
Count something your customers understand
Tokens, the unit AI models charge by, mean nothing to most customers. Nobody knows whether 500,000 tokens is a lot. They do know what five market reports, 200 drafted emails or 50 resolved support tickets are worth to them.
So count the thing your customer gets. Credits are useful when different actions cost you very different amounts: on Lovable, changing a button colour uses half a credit and adding sign-up and login uses a little over one. If you use credits, tell customers roughly what they buy, for example "100 credits is about 20 reports".
Keep everyday use simple. If your app has a chat, it usually works better to include normal use in the plan and count only the expensive actions, like generating a long document, than to charge for every message.
Work out what each customer costs you
Before you set an allowance, find out what your app's AI actually costs per action and per customer. Here's an illustration for an app that charges $25 a month:
| Customer | AI cost to you each month | What they pay | What's left |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | $1 | $25 | $24 |
| Regular | $5 | $25 | $20 |
| Heavy | $30 | $25 | -$5 |
The heavy customer is often the one who loves your product most, and on a flat price, they lose you money. An allowance with top-ups fixes that, and turns heavy use into extra revenue. Runway learned this in 2026, when it replaced its unlimited plan with a large monthly allowance of credits.
Leave some headroom. Model prices change, and so does how much people use your app once they rely on it.
Start simple with your first customers
For your first customers, one or two plans are plenty. Pick a price that reflects what the outcome is worth to them, include an allowance most of them won't run out of, and let anyone who does buy a top-up. Prepaid top-ups avoid surprise bills, which matter more to a small business than a slightly higher price.
Then expect to change it. In a Stripe survey of 200 software companies in 2026, 44% planned to change their pricing more than once in the following year. Your first price is a guess to test with real customers, and how to price B2B software for your first customers covers how to set it.