Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Three claims sit underneath everything that follows, and if you accept them the rest is arithmetic. First, the per-token price is an input cost, not a unit economic. Your customer does not buy tokens. They buy a summarised contract, a triaged support ticket, a reviewed pull request. The number of tokens that takes is a function of your engineering, not of the rate card, and it moves by multiples between a naive implementation and a careful one. Second, inference sits in cost of goods sold, and that changes the shape of the business. Traditional software has a marginal cost close to zero, which is where the 80 per cent gross margins came from. An AI product pays real money for every request served, forever. Published benchmarks for 2026 put AI product gross margins in…
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