Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments.

Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.

That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).

The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.

You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.

Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.

A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.

I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.