Topic

Cost Economics

How AI-native companies should think about unit economics — cost per user, margin compression, and why AI infrastructure spend behaves nothing like traditional cloud cost.

• The AI spend control plane, defined — Cloud spend got FinOps. AI spend is more volatile, more granular, and changes by the minute. Here are the five jobs a tool has to do to actually govern it.
• Why 2× customers doesn't mean 2× AI cost — The most dangerous assumption in an AI-native financial model is that cost scales linearly with users. It rarely does — and the gap is where runway quietly disappears.
• AI inference is COGS. Start treating it like one. — Most AI-native teams bury inference spend in "R&D" or a cloud line item. But it's a cost of goods sold — and where you book it changes whether you actually know your margins.