As the article surmised at the end; AI is most definitely not free (and infact is quite costly) but major players are subsidising the price and cost of tokens to developers, such that right now everyone is pretty much getting AI tools and processing power for free (or very very low cost).

The signs are many products and services adding AI cause they can, but there being very little logic as to how much this addition makes sense. In a way this is the artificial demand they can point to for their (untrue) ongoing growth narrative - look companies are still adding more and more AI.

Let’s take the example of Figma, which is listed on the market after a successful IPO. At its core it’s a very nice design tool that bought the innovation of collaborative live editing (ah la Google docs) to an adobe illustrator like product. It’s still great for this.

But in recent times much development has gone into their AI and MCP features, these likely bring some value; but the market sees these are offered features built like any other feature; when in fact there is a pay-for-use baked in that is being massively subsidised (on the basis that the future price will be high). So as a result customers see these are fun additional features to try out (for free). BUT when the time comes Figma is going to have to massively crank up the price (either overall or more likely for use of the AI features) as the mechanism that has subsidised low cost AI usage tokens runs dry.

The real question is: how many customers would really be willing to say pay double for Figma to keep the AI tooling they getting now? Or how many will be like screw that; those tools were fun but they are in no-way worth paying for - leading to customers stepping away from newly expensive AI features and products.

Figma offers a more valuable fundamental service than most digital products; in a world where AI tokens go way up in cost, think of all the dedicated AI apps that folks will just be like, nope I’m not paying. There’s your big bust.

This is the dynamic and reality to consider; what folks will do when the tokens stop being subsidiesed.