Unpredictable infrastructure costs and billing complexity for AI software

The integration of costly AI inference models means heavy users can rapidly consume more API resources than their flat-rate subscription covers, leading to severe margin erosion. Transitioning to usage-based pricing to solve this introduces massive engineering friction, requiring real-time metering systems that are highly complex to build and maintain. Furthermore, companies face decreased revenue predictability and increased customer billing disputes due to hard-to-understand usage metrics on invoices.