Recommended: Listen to this story (00:23 - 04:58):

The Story: Generative AI product owners pay a “compute” price every time someone uses their product. The processing power required to generate something is not free, and if you have a generative AI company, you’re currently trying to figure out how to price the service you provide fairly. That’s not an easy ask, and different GenAI companies have approached answering it in different ways.

Microsoft, for example, charges subscription rates ranging from $5 to $40 for its AI-assisted copilots. Box, a cloud content management platform, has opted for a credit system. Box provides users 20 credits for queries each month, but with access to the user’s company’s pool of an additional 2,000 queries. And then there’s Adobe, which also has a subscription plan, but combined with a credit system. For $4.99, users receive 100 generative credits per month.

But no system is perfect, and companies are experimenting right now, not only with how to price these products, but whether they should consider products as “selling points for existing features, or as new products,” according to Axios’s Ina Fried.

Adobe’s chief strategy officer Scott Belsky tells Axios that product pricing structures aren’t just about making money, and that Adobe’s credit system can also help the company gain dedicated subscribers.

As leading generative AI companies continue to roll out pricing structures for their services, we’re likely to start seeing a consensus form around the most optimal model for consumers and producers alike.

The Expert Take: Michael Marks, founder and general partner at Celesta Capital, sympathizes with the difficulty companies are finding in pinpointing the optimal pricing model.

He says, “It’s hard to come up with pricing when you’re really not that sure how your product sits in the marketplace competitively with others, how companies are going to use it, [and] how they are going to value it, so I think it’s going to take awhile for this one to sort out.”

Marks does not expect consumers will see a consensus on pricing structure anytime soon, however:

*Stay informed about the three biggest stories in venture capital and tech news every weekday morning. 2-min reads only.