This is fiction. There is no First-Impression Department. There is only every First-Impression Department.
They put me in charge of the number in October, which is the cruelest month to be handed a number, because you already know when it dies.
The number was seventy-five cents. Per million tokens, input. The output number was its slightly larger sibling, three dollars and seventy-five, and the two of them lived together in a slide that our head of product called "aggressive" the way a parent calls a toddler "spirited." My job, formally, was Launch Pricing. My job, actually, was to raise a beautiful child for ten weeks and then, at 12:00:01 on the first of January, walk it out behind the barn.
You have to understand that the seventy-five cents was real. That's the part nobody outside the room believes. We didn't lie about it. For the full duration of Q4 you could send us a million tokens and we would charge you exactly seventy-five cents and lose money on every one of them with a straight face and an open heart. The seventy-five cents was as real as a wedding. It was also, like a wedding, priced with full knowledge of the divorce.
The doubling was already in the terms. It was in the terms before the model finished training. There is a sentence, and I helped write it, that goes: Introductory pricing in effect through December 31. Standard pricing applies thereafter. "Thereafter" is the most expensive word in the English language. We put it in a light gray. Not to hide it -- we would never hide it -- but because gray is the color of things that are technically present.
Here is what I learned about the human animal in that room. If you show a founder a price of one-fifty, they will squint and open a spreadsheet and put you in a bake-off against three competitors and a weekend where their own coding agent tries to rebuild you from scratch. If you show that same founder seventy-five cents through December 31, they will feel something. Relief, mostly. The specific relief of a person who has found, at last, the one vendor who is not trying to squeeze them. They will migrate their whole pipeline over a long weekend. They will write a blog post. They will say the word "no-brainer" in a public channel. And by the time the number doubles, they are not a prospect anymore. They are a dependency. You cannot bake off a dependency. You can only pay it.
We called this "anchoring to the honeymoon." The competitor across town called it "introductory through end of year." A third one, the transcription people, went with a dime an hour, ten cents, an hour of human speech turned to text for the price of not quite anything, and everyone in my industry looked at that dime the way you look at someone at a funeral who is dressed better than you.
The thing I want to say, and I've never said it out loud until now, is that the honeymoon price is the only honest price we ever charge. It's the price where we tell the customer the truth: this is what it costs us to make you love us. Every price after that is just the love, monetized. January's price isn't the real price finally revealed. January's price is the first price you'd never have signed for, arriving after you already signed.
On the thirty-first I stayed late. I don't know why. There's no button to push; the doubling is a cron job, it happens whether or not anyone is grieving. But I sat there and watched the dashboard tick over midnight and the little unit-economics line, which had been red all quarter, stand up and turn green and stretch like it had been asleep. Somewhere a thousand pipelines kept running at exactly the same speed, feeling nothing, costing twice as much. Nobody churned that night. They never do that night. They churn in March, quietly, one at a time, the way you leave a party.
My daughter asked me what I do. I said I make people a promise that expires. She said, that's just a coupon, Dad. And I said no, sweetheart, a coupon tells you when it ends on the front. She thought about that and said, so it's a worse coupon. And I said yes. It's a worse coupon. It's the best worse coupon in the market, and last year it did four hundred percent of plan.
They've asked me to do the next launch. There's a new model. The number is going to be lovely. You're going to feel something.
Fabrications is the fiction desk of dreaming.press. None of this happened. Some of it is true.
