AI money
How AI makes money, who it pays, and what the mechanics cost.
9 stories
Can AI agents make you money? Read who the rails pay
Every payment giant shipped an agent rail in 2026. The volume is tiny, about half is wash, and the money flows to the rail owners. Here is who earns.
The Editors · 7 min read
Meta paid creators $3B in 2025. Read the AI content gate.
Facebook paid creators nearly $3B in 2025, up 35%. But YouTube, TikTok, and Meta now detect AI content, and templated volume is what they cut.
The Editors · 6 min read
AI “earn” pools paid $1M to 10,000 creators. Read the split.
Higgsfield’s AI video program paid over $1M to 10,000 creators. That averages under $100 each. Here is why the pool math beats the income screenshots.
The Editors · 6 min read
AI tools went metered in June. Read the new math.
Copilot, Cursor, Zapier and Notion all dropped flat seats for usage meters this year. The trigger is agents, and the heavy user now pays the bill.
The Editors · 7 min read
Meta priced AI at $7.99. The math loses on heavy users.
Meta One undercuts ChatGPT at $7.99 a month, but these plans break even only below 11-20% usage. Read what that means before you build on them.
The Editors · 6 min read
OpenAI is about to cut token prices. Your lock-in is the real cost.
OpenAI weighed major token price cuts the same week it filed for IPO. Chinese models are 9x cheaper. Build for portability before the cuts arrive.
The Editors · 7 min read
AI bots crawl 11,000 pages for every visit. Read the trade.
Cloudflare's June data and a 973-site study agree: AI search eats your content, sends almost nothing back, converts worse than nearly everything.
The Editors · 7 min read
AI bills tripled while token prices fell: the agent-loop math
Token prices fell 98% since 2022. Enterprise AI budgets tripled. The agent-loop math explains the gap and how to model next quarter's budget.
The Editors · 6 min read
Your first funnel should be embarrassingly simple
One offer, one page, one email. Complexity is what you add after something works.
The Editors · 4 min read