# The Dodo Digest: The Problem With "Unlimited" > Harvey's token usage grew 20x and its gross margins went from 50% to -50%. Why AI pricing needs to account for usage, and how credit-based pricing can help. - **Author**: Rishabh Goel - **Published**: 2026-09-28 - **Category**: Newsletter - **URL**: https://dodopayments.com/blogs/en/newsletter-september28 --- ### TL;DR - AI is changing the economics of SaaS. Usage can grow dramatically while revenue stays the same. - Harvey reportedly saw its AI token usage increase 20x this year, putting significant pressure on its margins. - The lesson isn't that every AI company needs to build its own model. It's that AI pricing needs to account for usage. - Credit-based pricing can give customers predictable subscriptions while giving startups more control over their costs. - This week, we also shipped **[Dodo Payments v1.113.28](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28)**, with improvements across billing, payments, checkout, and more. Hello everyone, I came across a Bloomberg story about Harvey this week that made me think about a problem we're going to see more and more across AI startups. Harvey reportedly saw its AI token usage increase 20x this year. The interesting part isn't just the growth. It's what happened to the economics underneath it. According to the report, its gross margins went from around 50% at the beginning of the year to -50% by June. That's what makes AI SaaS pricing so strange. One customer might use your product a few times a month. Another might have agents running all day. They're paying the same subscription, but the cost of serving them can be completely different. The revenue is fixed. The cost isn't. And that's where "unlimited" starts getting uncomfortable. A post from The Redline (@theredlinehq) reporting that Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to -50% by June as agent token use spiked twentyfold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models ## The Signal Traditional SaaS pricing was built around the idea that serving another customer doesn't become dramatically more expensive just because they use the product more. AI changes that. When every prompt, token, generation, or agent run has an underlying cost, your heaviest users can also become your most expensive customers. That's why I think we're going to see more AI companies rethink what "unlimited" actually means. The answer isn't necessarily to make pricing complicated. It's to make it reflect how the product is actually being used. A news headline reading "OpenAI, Anthropic Costs Push More Startups to Build Off Cheaper Open Models", above a photo of the Kimi AI chat interface running on a monitor ## Why This Matters This is where I think credit-based pricing makes a lot of sense. You can still have a predictable monthly subscription, but that subscription comes with a defined amount of usage. The customer knows what they're paying for. You have a clearer idea of what that customer can cost you. And if they need more, they can simply buy more credits. Subscription + Usage = Credits. It creates a middle ground between completely unpredictable usage-based pricing and unlimited plans that can become difficult to sustain. And as AI products become more capable, I think understanding that balance between growth and unit economics is going to become increasingly important. ## What We Shipped That same focus on giving businesses more control over their pricing and payments is reflected in Dodo Payments [v1.113.28](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28). One of the bigger updates this week is [Subscription Grace Periods](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#2-subscription-grace-period). Merchants can now keep customers active for 1-30 days after a failed renewal, giving them time to resolve the payment issue before the subscription is put on hold or cancelled. We also introduced [Manual Payment Retry](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#4-manual-payment-retry), allowing merchants to retry failed subscription payments directly from the payment detail page using the customer's saved payment method. Alongside that, we shipped: - **[Customer Blocklists](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#3-customer-blocklist)**, allowing businesses to block specific customers or email addresses from making future purchases. - **[Payment Activity Logs](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#5-activity-log-on-payments)**, giving merchants a chronological view of a payment from initiation through capture, refunds, and disputes. - **[Georgian Checkout](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#10-georgian-checkout)**, bringing checkout support to 22 languages. - **[Card-Optional at $0 Price](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#11-card-optional-at-%240-price)**, allowing subscriptions to start without collecting a payment method when nothing is due. - **[Mandatory Tax ID at Checkout](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.28#12-mandatory-tax-id-at-checkout)**, making it easier for businesses to collect tax information from B2B customers. We also made improvements to discount creation, subscription cancellation, plan-change payments, KYC retries, and subscription notifications. A lot of these updates are about giving businesses more control over what happens after a customer starts paying. As billing gets more complex, that control becomes increasingly important. The Dodo Payments dashboard Blocklist settings page, showing four blocked customers and a table of blocked email identifiers with who blocked them and when ## One Last Thought AI makes it incredibly easy to say "unlimited." But unlimited usage doesn't mean unlimited cost. As founders, we need to think about both sides of the equation: how much value we're creating for the customer, and what it actually costs us to deliver it. Because the best pricing model isn't necessarily the one that sounds the simplest. It's the one that lets the business keep growing. Also, join our loving [Discord community](https://discord.gg/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984)! Best, **Rishabh Goel** **Co-Founder, Dodo Payments** --- - [More Newsletter articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs/category/newsletter) - [All articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs)