The Token Pricing Trap
When you price by the word, you incentivize hallucinations. Why enterprise reliability requires a capacity-based model.
If you look at the pricing page of almost any "AI Agent" platform, you see the same thing: Credits. You pay for every token generated, every step taken, every API call made.
It seems logical—pay for what you use. But for an enterprise system, it is a fatal architectural flaw. Pricing by tokens implies that the value of the system is text generation.
The Value Mismatch
"The value is the text. The more words the bot writes, the more you pay."
"The value is the Trust. The governance, safety, and reliability of the execution."
The Incentive Simulator
See how pricing models change engineering behavior.
Optimized for Cost
"To save credits, we skipped the verification step. It's cheaper, but the agent just hallucinated a refund policy."
1. Credits price the Brain, but you buy the Conscience
In our architecture, the LLM (the Brain) is intentionally de-emphasized. It is swappable, constrained, and non-authoritative. The expensive part—and the valuable part—is the Supervised Runtime (the Conscience) that:
- Enforces guardrails and policy checks.
- Verifies output schemas and structured data.
- Logs every decision for audit and rollback.
Charging by tokens tells customers to optimize the wrong thing (shorter prompts) instead of the right thing (safe outcomes).
2. The "Safety Tax"
A true safety circuit requires multi-pass generation. You generate the draft, then you run a separate "Critic" pass to verify it against policy. You might run a third pass to format it.
The Conflict of Interest
If a buyer is staring at a token meter, they will pressure you to remove these safety steps. "Just ship the email," they'll say. That is exactly how AI SDRs become unreliable liabilities.
3. Procurement doesn't budget for "Tokens"
Enterprise procurement teams do not think in variable micro-transactions. They think in Capacity and Risk. They ask:
- "How many teams can use this?"
- "What is the uptime SLA?"
- "How many workflows can we deploy?"
- Seats & Roles (Builders, Auditors)
- Throughput Tiers (Jobs/Hour)
- Active Agents in Production
Price on Trust, Not Text
We don't treat tokens as the product. Tokens measure how much text a model generated. Our value is the Supervised Runtime that makes agents reliable.
You’re not buying words—you’re buying a system you can trust in production.
