Per-use pricing is the fairest way to sell AI work: customers pay for exactly what they use, and small customers can start small. But there is a reason so few services price that way. It's the fixed fee on every card payment.

The arithmetic

Take a service that sells $10 of usage as 200 uses at 5 cents each, to a customer in the US, at standard US card list pricing (2.9 % plus 30 cents per charge).

Charged one use at a time: each 5-cent charge costs 2.9 % of 5 cents plus 30 cents, about 30.1 cents. Two hundred of them cost about $60.29 in fees, six times the $10 of revenue. Nobody can sell that way.

What services do instead: they sell a $10 bundle up front and stop metering. The customer pays for usage they may never use, and the service loses the ability to price each use.

Paying the fixed fee once

The fix is to pay the card fee once, not 200 times. The customer authorizes their card once for up to $10. Each use is then metered against that budget, with a hard cap and a receipt, and at the end only what was used is captured.

In this example, one $10 card payment costs about 59 cents at the same list pricing, plus a 0.5 % platform fee at launch: about $0.64 in total, instead of $60.29. The 200 uses are still billed one by one, and the customer can see and stop their own budget.

Why it matters for AI

AI work is naturally per use: a generation, a minute of audio, a thousand tokens, one API call. When the fixed fee is paid once per budget instead of once per use, per-use pricing becomes possible for amounts far smaller than a card payment could ever carry.

Stablecoin payments go further still: there is no fixed card fee at all, and payouts arrive at settlement rather than on a payout schedule. Most end users don't hold stablecoins yet, which is why both matter.

The fine print

These figures use standard US list pricing; international cards and currency conversion add more on the traditional side. The Dynamo preview runs in test mode, so no real money moves yet: these numbers describe how it works at real-money launch. Card pricing beyond the platform fee is set by the card processor.

The Dynamo preview lets you try this flow today with Stripe test cards: request access.