AI money
How AI makes money, who it pays, and what the mechanics cost.
19 stories
GitHub Copilot cut team AI credits up to 44%. The price didn’t move.
On 1 September, Copilot Business seats fell from 3,000 included credits to 1,900 and Enterprise from 7,000 to 3,900. Seat prices did not move.
The Editors · 7 min read
When your AI tool gets acquired, you get about a week to export.
Acquisitions are 150 of the 285 entries in the biggest AI tool graveyard. Clockwise and Hiro users each got seven days. Read where the risk sits.
The Editors · 8 min read
OpenRouter charges 5.5% to load credits. Stripe just bought it.
OpenRouter takes 5.5% when you load credits and zero markup on the tokens. Four outlets report four different prices for what Stripe paid to own it.
The Editors · 7 min read
AI music is cheap to make. Read what streaming pays back.
Suno spins up a song for pennies. Spotify pays about $0.004 a stream, ignores tracks under 1,000 plays, and just purged 75 million AI uploads.
The Editors · 7 min read
Vibe coding is sold as a $10K/month shortcut. Read the survival rate.
A few solo founders clear six figures with AI-built apps. In 2026 the gap to everyone else hit 400x, and the code shipped with the security holes.
The Editors · 6 min read
Faceless AI YouTube is sold as passive income. Read the money rules.
The 2026 pitch says generate videos at scale and collect ad money on autopilot. YouTube's own payout rules pay for the human work the pitch removes.
The Editors · 6 min read
OpenAI cut Luna's price 80%. Read what it left untouched.
OpenAI cut its cheapest GPT-5.6 model 80% and its top coder 0%. The asymmetry is a map of where it still has pricing power, and where it lost it.
The Editors · 6 min read
Selling AI prompts is a $2.5B market. Read what sellers keep.
The prompt-marketplace pitch is 80% revenue share and passive income. The per-seller numbers on PromptBase and the GPT Store say something colder.
The Editors · 6 min read
AI agents cost $0.50 to $2.00 per resolution. Read who defines it.
AI support agents cost $0.50 to $2.00 per resolution. Each vendor writes its own rule for when one counts, and that rule moves your bill more than the price.
The Editors · 7 min read
AI agent marketplaces take 3% to 25%. OpenAI won't say its cut.
Microsoft and Google take just 3% to sell an AI agent. Salesforce takes up to 25%. OpenAI runs the biggest store and still won't publish its cut.
The Editors · 6 min read
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