AI companies must watch out for freeloaders burning tokens for free—and wrecking margins one sign-up at a time

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AI is breaking one of software’s most attractive assumptions: Once you build a product, serving one more customer costs almost nothing.

Traditional software may have required heavy upfront investment, but once the product was created, developers could distribute the result at very low marginal cost. Generative AI is different. Every prompt, every generated answer, every agentic task must be produced and paid for afresh.