Is your small business burning cash on software you hardly use?

You may have noticed that whenever you look for a tech solution to a problem, you're often required to commit to a month or even a year of service. This can be frustrating, especially when life gets busy, and you forget to cancel before the next billing cycle hits.

As a business owner, why are you still paying for access to a tool instead of just paying for the results you actually need?

Rather than investing in software you might not use, wouldn’t it be better to pay for the exact services that solve your specific problems? This way, you’re not just keeping your tools—you’re using them effectively to power your business.

Small business owners often juggle many different subscriptions each month, like Canva for graphic design, HubSpot for customer relationship management, Mailchimp for email marketing, Dropbox for storage, and DocuSign for e-signatures. Each of these tools can come with its own monthly fee, and it’s easy to lose track of how much is being spent. When you add in accounting software, project management tools like Trello, and even simple things like website hosting, your bills can add up quickly. As a small business owner, you might find yourself wondering if the value of these subscriptions even justifies the costs.

For example, a local Bed and Breakfast might want to send out a newsletter email for an event they do once a year during the holidays. Their only option today is to pay for a monthly subscription to a fancy email marketing tool. Suddenly, the B & B ends up with a high fixed monthly cost for access to this tool, rather than just being able to accomplish the goal that they had. Even if they only intend to pay for a single month, they will probably forget to cancel it and it stays on their credit card, slowly draining resources.

It's death by a thousand monthly charges.

Why is most small business software priced as a subscription for access? It's simple - it's because that's what's best for the big tech companies behind them. You keep your credit card on file with them and they earn outrageous gross margins for giving you access to a tool that you hardly use. We don't think this is customer-centric at all.

The new AI companies aren't all that different. Rather than charging you a fixed subscription fee for unlimited use, they actually charge you money for tokens or credits. What's a token? It's hard to tell - every company has a different definition. And that's the point.

Usually, AI models count each word or piece of data processed when you use it and call that a token. It's like paying for every ingredient used in a recipe. There are also rate limits, which means there’s a maximum amount of those tokens you can use within a certain time period, like a cap on how many times you can order from your favorite restaurant in a week. If you don't like the output you get from AI - well that's too bad, because you use up your tokens either way. Often you have to buy more tokens or get bumped down to a worse version of the AI to keep using the service.

This can be confusing. For instance, imagine a shop owner using AI to generate an image for their website. It’s hard to tell how much they will spend to do it - it's like trying to guess next week's weather.

How many tokens does it take to get to a graphic that you like? If you use 3,000 credits on generating that image - is that a good deal? If tokens sound like Monopoly Money to you, you'd be right.

People don't think about work like this. Small business owners want to pay for outcomes, not effort. Paying for effort when you're not sure of the outcome is almost as bad as paying for access. By hiding the dollars you're spending on each generation with abstract concepts like tokens or credits, most AI companies are hoping you keep generating without thinking about the cost, even if it's not adding any real value to your business.

We think there's a better way.

At Exponent AI, we've priced our AI Marketing Teammate in units that matter to small business owners - the output that they actually use in their business. In our case, we price by post. It's simple - Blog Articles and Instagram Posts cost $5 apiece, and Facebook Posts are $2.50 a pop. You only pay for what you post.

What does that mean? It means that if you use our AI teammate AND you like the content it comes up with AND you actually post it - then it gets added to your bill, like a utility. If you don't like it and want to make edits - well, that costs you nothing. If you don't use it at all? It costs you nothing.

Think about a bakery using AI to make social media posts for their new cupcake flavors. With a per-post price, they can easily figure out what they’re spending, knowing upfront how much each post will cost. That includes the text, the images, all the edits and revisions, and scheduling the post too! Even better, we don't charge you a dime for cross-posts. Posting or adapting the same content for different platforms shouldn't cost you more.

The future of AI pricing should move towards being flexible and focused on customers. Want to send out an email update to your customers? It should cost you a few bucks - not an overloaded subscription fee for features you barely use. Want to use AI to resolve a customer service inquiry? You should only have to pay if the AI is solving customer issues for you. Want AI to create a report on your finances? You should only pay if you actually use it, not for the privilege of access to the AI.

Pay-for-work pricing in AI not only eases the burden of high costs but also creates chances for small businesses to use technology in ways that help them grow. As AI keeps improving, the pricing should adjust to meet the changing needs of different businesses.

It’s time to take control and stop wasting money on unused software and useless tokens. Pay for the work product you like and use. Your wallet (and your business) will thank you for it.