Box unveils a unique AI pricing plan to account for the high cost of running LLMs. One of the difficulties businesses have when generative AI is integrated into commercial software is how to reasonably price it so that they can recover the expense of comparing their material to basic huge language models like OpenAI’s.
In May of last year, Box unveiled Box AI, introducing generative AI to the platform through a collaboration with OpenAI. Today, the business unveiled a novel pricing strategy for its AI feature at BoxWorks, its annual client conference.
A user of Box’s credit-based system will receive 20 monthly credits, good for any number of AI jobs totaling up to 20 events. Therefore, Levie explained, “You receive 20 inquiries every month regardless of whether you ask a document query, develop content in Box Notes, or go to a hub and ask a question.
What occurs if they exceed that? They can then use 2,000 more credits from a pooled pool belonging to the entire business. As a result, Box’s AI features may continue to be utilized by power users without incurring additional costs for the business.
Customers who often utilize AI services can purchase additional credit blocks. The firm has a pooled pool of 2000 AI credits for anybody who exceeds it. And once you exceed that shared pool, you purchase further blocks of AI credits, he continued. According to Levie, the firm is currently figuring out how that would operate, but they plan on having businesses purchase extra blocks for 10,000 credits.
After speaking with clients and learning about how they utilize Box’s AI capabilities, they developed this system. “We developed a model that showed we could make it simple for the typical user to start using AI. However, we have a method where you only pay for their larger volume consumption as you have these more sophisticated power users.
Levie explained that they needed to find a method to charge clients fairly while acknowledging that the underlying resources required to run the generative AI model may be rather costly. He thinks this pricing strategy does that.
The business also disclosed that starting next month, subscribers to its Enterprise Plus subscription plan would have access to the first two Box AI services in beta: generating content in Box Notes and asking queries about certain documents. These clients will use the new price structure when they start charging for these capabilities.
