> Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens.

That’s not a completely accurate characterization of what’s been happening. AI coding agent startups like Cursor and Windsurf started by attracting developers with free or deeply discounted tokens, then adjusted the pricing as they figure out how to be profitable. This happened with Kiro too[1] and is happening now with Google’s Antigravity. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on HN about this practice.

[1] disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own

I think you’re talking about a different thing? The bad practice from AWS et al is that you post-pay for your usage, so usage can be any amount. With all the AI things I’ve seen, either: - you prepay a fixed amount (“$200/mo for ChatGPT Max”) - you deposit money upfront into a wallet, if the wallet runs out of cash then you can’t generate any more tokens - it’s free!

I haven’t seen any of the major model providers have a system where you use as many tokens as you want and then they bill you, like AWS has.