OpenAI’s pricing was in the news last week, after CEO Sam Altman admitted on X that he had personally set the price for the company’s Chat GPT Pro package at $200/mo, and that he was surprised to discover that they were losing money on it.

Many professional pricers questioned both why the CEO was personally setting prices and also why the company was not using a pricing model which billed more directly for usage rather than offering a virtually unlimited top tier for the relatively modest price of $200/month.

But OpenAI is not just pricing a product, they’re trying to nurture a whole new industry. The viability of AI will be determined not by what OpenAI charges for the top product tier right now, but rather how quickly other businesses using the OpenAI platform develop new products that produce huge amounts of value. Once there are thriving industries making money from OpenAI’s products, it will be easy for them to charge those customers based on the value they are getting. But until customers spend enough time with OpenAI’s products to figure out how to make lots of money using it, OpenAI will have limited ability to truly monetize their products.

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