We offer a one-of-a-kind AI solution (at least that was the case when I last looked). Our solution is almost entirely built around receiving prompts and delivering AI responses via email. we call our service ai@ and you can find it on the tasl.ai website.
The use cases are extensive of course and we have a free self building tool where users can create their own custom AI/Knowledge Vault. We offer two key pricing options Pay-as-you-go (starting at £4/$5.16) and subscription starting at £39.99/$50. We also allow non-clients to get a limited number of responses from our customer ai for free - which makes it a great lead generation tool. Given the agentic nature of what we do, we are providing considerable value above and beyond this pricing. I’m looking for guidance on how to craft our story effectively to achieve a pricing level that will enable the business to scale rapidly. Thoughts?
Hey David – awesome question and very cool product.
Seems like ai@ is a essentially an AI assistant for customer support. Is that accurate?
I think a good place to start would be to identify the value prop, and get laser focused on that. Maybe it’s “Scale CS with AI without losing control.” Or something like that. From the website, it’s not totally clear what ai@ does.
Think a good example in another area is FyxerAI - they’ve done a good job of honing in on a paint point with email and positioned their AI assistant as a remedy for that.
Would be curious what others in this group think about the agentic pricing piece:
David, how “well defined” are the success criteria for your agentic solution?
Generally, the more well defined they are, the more you can move towards pricing per outcome or even their workflow (where you can automate a well-known process).
If you believe your agent replaces a human, that’s also relatively easy to price - but I wasn’t getting that from your description or your website.
If the use cases are ‘extensive’ I’m going to take a guess that your solution is relatively horizontal (e.g. can be used by lots of different types of businesses for lots of different types of value creation).
It is incredibly hard to price on outcome/value on horizontal solutions - because you essentially provide an input for the customer to then run into their own value creation process in a way they own and know.
So 2 options for you:
Horizontal:
charge per email or other similar ‘unit’.
Use a credit system - e.g. 50 emails/mth/$50 etc.
Unused credits roll over to next period.
Unsubscribe: loose all credits.
Freemium: 10 credits/mth for free.
= change numbers to whatever you want, but that is the structure. Just experiment and hustle until you get to ~$1M ARR. If larger accounts reach out - sell them in any way they want to be sold.
Vertical:
Pick ONE vertical, where you can provide a ton of value. Not two. One. Uno. 1. !.
Pick ONE high value and in high-demand use case for that vertical
E.g. customer success for private banking clients. Whatever. But ONE.
Converge all product towards providing more value to that one vertical and use case.
Do things that don’t scale around it. Manually review all emails. Call customers.
Price based on a unit very close to the unit-economics of that vertical and use case
E.g. ‘per private banking client’
Charge a lot - aim for ACVs north of $50K.
Sell it by talking to customers. Preferably face to face.
Close on any pricing model and contract you can. Hustle a lot.
When you hit ~$3M : review and do the next $10M on the model that worked best on the first $3M. Then review again.
Great concept. Given my background, I want to drill into the value side of things. Can you give me a couple examples of “how you provide considerable value”?
The point being that the more unique customer value, the better the options for your pricing strategy. [This is a quick read of what I mean] (Why You Should Care about your Product's Value).
To echo the other doyens in the thread, I would start with determining the value metrics of your business. These are the metrics that will inform pricing.
I would start from the simplest solution. You sell AI responses through email. The value the customer getting is the email with the AI information. I would start by making each email my “pricing unit” and price accordingly.
Pay-as-you-go might be a good solution for developers, but in this case, it has some risks involved for you (unforeseen processing costs) and for the client (they might not be aware of how much they are using.) Metering seems important in this business; I would start with a solution that resembles “100 emails per month” and charge accordingly. As you go up in value, price per value goes down.