One post tagged with "billing"

Microsoft's Copilot launched with a clean story: $30/user/month, productivity multiplied. The actual math was uglier. Once you factored in the base enterprise license, compute costs per active user, and support overhead, Microsoft was losing over$20 per user per month on the feature. Finance didn't catch this immediately because the costs lived in the infrastructure budget, not the product P&L. Engineering knew the token bills were large. Nobody had connected the two lines.

This is the billing problem that most AI teams build into their products without realizing it. Not the pricing strategy problem — that's a product decision. The engineering problem: you have no infrastructure to measure what AI features actually cost per customer, per feature, and per request at the granularity required to make any pricing model work.