Oz

I think @stripe just mass produced a business model for every AI startup on earth and increased their TAM exponentially. Customer buys a shirt for $40, Stripe takes 2.9% + 30 cents. It's a simple formula, but token billing is completely different. AI costs are variable. They shift by model, by provider, by week. A startup using Claude for 40% of inference and GPT-4o for 60% has a blended cost structure that changes every time Anthropic or OpenAI adjusts pricing... which is constantly. Stripe is now ingesting those real-time model prices, applying the startup's target markup, metering per-customer usage, and generating the invoice automatically. That's constructing unit economics at a scale and complexity far beyond anything in traditional payments. And the data asset being created by them is a massive moat. OpenAI knows what OpenAI charges, and Anthropic knows what Anthropic charges. But Stripe will know what every model charges, what every startup pays, what every startup marks up, and what every end customer actually consumes. But the gateway is where this gets really interesting. Stripe's AI gateway routes inference, returns the response, and attributes tokens to the customer in one API call. Today it's "pick the best model." Tomorrow it's "Stripe recommends the model that optimizes your target margin across 12 providers in real time." The moment that recommendation engine turns on, model providers start competing on Stripe's terms. Pricing power inverts from provider to platform. This is AWS turned sideways (or i guess diagonally). Amazon didn't build apps... they built the infrastructure every app depended on, then used the data to optimize the infrastructure itself. Stripe is running the same playbook on AI economics instead of AI compute. I truly believe that token billing will make Stripe the most strategically important company in tech that doesn't train a model.