Strategies to monetize AI apps and agents

I am a developer who loves to build new stuff. I have built a huge amount of free and open-source apps and tools. For the past couple of years, I focused on building many AI tools and agents. Traditional apps vs AI apps/agents monetization strategies There is a fundamental difference between the traditional app and the new AI app and agents. While the infrastructure costs for traditional applications are almost negligible - which means you can offer free tiers or even a free application - when we add AI, even a small number of users may break the bank due to the inference costs. As developers, we are forced to add paywalls to the AI apps and agents so that we can, at least, cover the inference costs. There are two main approaches: 1. Credit system: selling users certain amounts of credits that are consumed as they use our app. This is the best alternative if you are building AI agents because you never know how much computation the user will actually spend. 2. Subscription: users pay a fixed amount every month. This is a high-risk implementation for the developer because the user consumption may be bigger than the subscription. With traditional applications, subscriptions could be of different tiers so that a user paying a "tier 1" had access to certain features while others paying a "tier 2" may have access to extra ones. The limitation with AI apps is different because you need to limit a feature the user is already paying for, which is not well received by the paying users. There is a third approach that is becoming popular, despite the security issues implied for the users, which is asking for an AI provider API key. I highly discourage this method for two reasons: 1. Non-technical users have no idea what's an API key and they will mismanage it. 2. It goes against most providers' ToS. Monetizing AI apps without paywalls The ideal solution from the developer's point of view is that each user automatically pays his inference. Similar to how you plug appliances into the wall socket, you pay your electricity utility bill and connect whatever you want. Also, developers want to monetize the apps, so allowing them to charge per run or adding a markup to the spending they could monetize from the first usage. For users, this should happen automatically without having to pass a paywall per app and they should have total control and monitoring of how much they are spending and where their information is going. The solution we built We built BrainLink with the above in mind, to help fellow developers get more users and monetize their AI apps from the first usage. Every user has a brain (an account) that can link to any application supporting BrainLink with a single click. The brain provides the application with identity, inference costs automatically covered by the user (using any of the 180+ supported models), and monetization (either adding a markup fee or a per-run price), among other features we are working on. A user can access all the applications using just this brain, which significantly reduces the friction associated with signup forms and paywalls on individual apps. I would love to get your feedback on BrainLink, so please feel free to comment or reach out! BrainLink website

Mar 24, 2025 - 14:50

Strategies to monetize AI apps and agents

I am a developer who loves to build new stuff. I have built a huge amount of free and open-source apps and tools. For the past couple of years, I focused on building many AI tools and agents.

Traditional apps vs AI apps/agents monetization strategies

There is a fundamental difference between the traditional app and the new AI app and agents.

While the infrastructure costs for traditional applications are almost negligible - which means you can offer free tiers or even a free application - when we add AI, even a small number of users may break the bank due to the inference costs.

As developers, we are forced to add paywalls to the AI apps and agents so that we can, at least, cover the inference costs. There are two main approaches:

1. Credit system: selling users certain amounts of credits that are consumed as they use our app. This is the best alternative if you are building AI agents because you never know how much computation the user will actually spend.

2. Subscription: users pay a fixed amount every month. This is a high-risk implementation for the developer because the user consumption may be bigger than the subscription. With traditional applications, subscriptions could be of different tiers so that a user paying a "tier 1" had access to certain features while others paying a "tier 2" may have access to extra ones. The limitation with AI apps is different because you need to limit a feature the user is already paying for, which is not well received by the paying users.

There is a third approach that is becoming popular, despite the security issues implied for the users, which is asking for an AI provider API key. I highly discourage this method for two reasons: 1. Non-technical users have no idea what's an API key and they will mismanage it. 2. It goes against most providers' ToS.

Monetizing AI apps without paywalls

The ideal solution from the developer's point of view is that each user automatically pays his inference. Similar to how you plug appliances into the wall socket, you pay your electricity utility bill and connect whatever you want.
Also, developers want to monetize the apps, so allowing them to charge per run or adding a markup to the spending they could monetize from the first usage.

For users, this should happen automatically without having to pass a paywall per app and they should have total control and monitoring of how much they are spending and where their information is going.

The solution we built

We built BrainLink with the above in mind, to help fellow developers get more users and monetize their AI apps from the first usage.

Every user has a brain (an account) that can link to any application supporting BrainLink with a single click. The brain provides the application with identity, inference costs automatically covered by the user (using any of the 180+ supported models), and monetization (either adding a markup fee or a per-run price), among other features we are working on.

A user can access all the applications using just this brain, which significantly reduces the friction associated with signup forms and paywalls on individual apps.

I would love to get your feedback on BrainLink, so please feel free to comment or reach out!

BrainLink website