Dollar floors go dark, burn rates go public
Disclosure is neither retreating nor advancing — it is re-sorting by which half of the price equation gets published. In one 2026 window 10 corpus companies pulled down a price they used to publish and 14 published one for the first time, but the withdrawals are almost entirely dollar-denominated floors and ceilings (Netlify's $500/mo Enterprise floor, Moonshot's $599/yr/seat) while the new disclosures are almost entirely per-action burn rates (Glean's 13-capability credit card, Jasper's per-action credits). Vendors are trading knowability of the bill for knowability of the meter, and that combination is strictly less useful to a buyer than either half alone.
What's happening — and why
What's happening: ask 'is AI pricing getting more transparent?' as a yes/no question and this window is noise. Ten companies in the 380-company corpus removed a price they had published; fourteen published one for the first time. That wash is exactly why the sibling trend on the unit rate going dark reached disclosure parity (14 disclosures against 13 withdrawals cumulatively) and weakened this cycle. Sort the same 24 dated events by *what* moved and it stops being noise — it is a trade.
What comes off the page is dollar-denominated. Netlify dropped the 'Custom, starts at $500/month' caption under Enterprise while every other rate held (Free $0, Personal $9, Pro $20, and the credit rates — 15 credits per deploy, 10/GB-hr compute, 20/GB bandwidth, 180 credits per $1 of AI spend). Moonshot pulled Kimi Enterprise's only public price, $599/yr/seat, and routed visitors to sales, while the consumer ladder ($0–$199/mo) and the per-token developer API stayed fully public. Metronome deleted '$100,000 in billing volume included' and '10M events included' three weeks after first publishing them, keeping the flat rates (0.8% of billing volume, $0.04/1k events). Arize removed the AX Pro overage rows — roughly $10 per million trace spans and $3 per GB — while headline prices ($0 Free, $50 Pro) held. Usage AI deleted the worked fee example ($1,200 on $8,000/mo of savings, about 15%). Groq's pricing page now 308-redirects to a homepage with no pricing content at all.
What goes on the page is a burn rate. Apollo replaced a rate-free API pricing page with a per-endpoint credit table (people enrichment 1–9 credits, email waterfall 1–4, phone waterfall 8–25, 0 for create/update/list/manage). Glean expanded its Enterprise Flex docs into a 13-line rate card with p50/p90 credit burn per capability — Deep Research ~33/~144, Advanced Agent Run ~150/~450 — while glean.com/pricing still 301-redirects to the homepage. Jasper layered a credit meter onto per-seat pricing and published the rate card (10 credits per Grid row, 40 per Research Agent run, 100 per Optimization Agent run) with no dollar-per-credit rate anywhere. Luma and Photoroom converted relative '4x usage' multipliers into absolute credit totals at unchanged prices, and Lindy published its credit bands (Plus 3,000, Pro 15,000, Max 35,000 per seat) for the first time.
Why this is worse than either half alone: a buyer needs two numbers to forecast a bill — how many units an action consumes, and what a unit costs. Vendors are increasingly willing to publish the first and increasingly unwilling to publish the second. Glean and Jasper both publish a complete per-action meter with no dollar figure at all: the meter is fully legible and the bill is unknowable. That hands the vendor a private price control while the published half creates an appearance of transparency, because the withheld half is where repricing actually happens. Apollo shows a second-order version — its rate is published, but people enrichment costs 1 credit for demographics or email and 9 if a mobile phone is returned, a 9x swing decided by what Apollo finds rather than what the buyer asked for. HeyGen is the window's one complete equation: it published both the 16-row credit schedule and the dollar rate behind it ($0.05/credit, $5 per 100-credit block).
How it works
Evidence over time
14 supporting · 0 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Apollo | Jul 2026 | Replaced a rate-free "API Pricing" page (which pushed buyers to a login-gated About Credits page) with a per-endpoint credit table: people enrichment 1-9 credits (1 for demographics/email, +8 if a mobile phone is returned), email waterfall 1-4 (20+ in some configs), phone waterfall 8-25 (45+ in some configs), 0 credits for create/update/list/manage. |
| Glean | Jul 2026 | Publishes no dollar figure anywhere (glean.com/pricing still 301-redirects to the homepage) yet expanded its Enterprise Flex docs to a 13-line rate card with p50/p90 credit burn per capability — Adaptive Reasoning ~11/~38 standard and ~26/~83 premium, Deep Research ~33/~144, Advanced Agent Run ~150/~450. The meter is fully specified; the dollar is not. |
| Jasper | Jul 2026 | Layered a credit meter onto pure per-seat pricing and published a rate card for it — 10 credits per Grid row, 10 per GEO Hub query, 40 per Research or Translation Agent run, 100 per Optimization Agent run, API/MCP 1-40 per call — with NO dollar-per-credit rate published. Seat prices unchanged at $59/$69. |
| HeyGen | Jul 2026 | Published credit top-ups at $0.05/credit ($5 per 100-credit block) and avatar slots at $29/mo (Video Avatar) and $49/mo (LiveAvatar) for the first time, and grew the credit-usage schedule to 16 rows. Video Agent went 20 to 30 credits/min standard, 90 in Seedance mode. |
| Luma AI | Jul 2026 | Replaced relative "4x usage" / "15x usage" framing with absolute monthly credit totals — Plus 10,000, Pro 40,000, Ultra 150,000 — at unchanged prices ($30/$90/$300 monthly). Photoroom made the same multipliers-to-absolutes move on 2026-07-22 (8,000/25,000/75,000 AI credits, 1,000/3,000/10,000 exports). |
| Lindy | Aug 2026 | Published its credit meter for the first time — Plus 3,000, Pro 15,000, Max 35,000 credits per seat with named credit bands by task size — alongside a move to per-seat billing, a 40% Plus cut ($49.99 to $29.99/user/mo) and removal of the struck-through "$8,000/month human assistant" anchor. |
| Netlify | Aug 2026 | Dropped the "Custom, starts at $500/month" caption under the Enterprise tier; the card now reads only "Custom". Every other rate held — Free $0, Personal $9, Pro $20, and the credit rates (deploys 15 credits, compute 10/GB-hr, bandwidth 20/GB, 180 credits per $1 of AI spend). |
| Moonshot AI | Aug 2026 | Pulled Kimi Enterprise's only public price — $599/yr/seat, live through 2026-07-30 — along with its feature list, routing visitors straight to [email protected]. The consumer assistant ladder ($0-$199/mo) and the per-token developer API stayed fully public. |
| Metronome | Aug 2026 | Removed the included-volume numbers from Starter ("$100,000 in billing volume included", "10M events included") three weeks after first publishing them, leaving only the flat metered rates 0.8% of billing volume and $0.04/1k events. The rates themselves held. |
| Arize AI | Jul 2026 | Removed the explicit AX Pro overage rows — ~$10 per million trace spans and ~$3 per GB — during a rebuild into a collapsible feature table. Confirmed absent with every accordion expanded. Headline prices ($0 Free, $50 Pro) and included quotas unchanged. |
| Groq | Aug 2026 | groq.com/pricing now 308-redirects to a homepage with no pricing content and no Pricing nav link. Per-token rates survive in the GroqCloud docs, but three built-in agentic tools (web search, website visits, code execution) have NO live public source at all, because their docs defer to the deleted page. |
| Usage AI | Jul 2026 | Deleted the inline fee calculator (a worked ~15% example: $1,200 fee on $8,000/mo of savings) and the ICR-vs-ESR comparison. The FAQ now says only "a percentage of the savings we realize for you, billed monthly." The only surviving published rate — 20% of EC2 savings, 35% on RDS-class — lives on AWS Marketplace, not usage.ai. |
| Poolside | Jul 2026 | After two years with no pricing page, no free tier and no self-serve path, published its first prices ever — Laguna XS 2.1 at $0.06/$0.12 and Laguna S 2.1 at $0.10/$0.20 per 1M — on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway rather than on poolside.ai, which still 404s /pricing. |
| Observe.AI | Jul 2026 | observe.ai/pricing 404s again, but its AWS Marketplace listing now publishes a fully metered contract with NO seat dimension: Minutes per Month $4.80/unit and Number of Interactions $12.00/unit for 12 months (exactly double for 24 months, i.e. no posted commitment discount). |
Counterexamples
- Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) · — — Broke the pattern by publishing plain DOLLARS, not burn rates: on 2026-07-21 it posted entry prices for its paid plans for the first time — Standard from $0/mo Serverless or $126/GB/mo Dedicated, Enterprise from $197/mo Dedicated — while adding a per-minute On-demand Compute meter.
- Freshworks · — — Also published a plain dollar rate after two years of sales quotes: Freddy AI Agent at $49 per 100 bot sessions (~$0.49/session), identical on Growth, Pro and Enterprise (2026-07-21) — in the same release where it deleted its free plan.
- You.com · — — Replaced an open-ended ">$2,000.00 /1k calls" label on its top Research tier with a firm $1,200.00 /1k calls on 2026-07-22 — simultaneously a ~40% cut at the top of the range and a disclosure, while keeping the Contact Sales CTA.
Trivia
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Glean and Jasper both publish a complete per-action meter with no dollar figure anywhere. Glean's Enterprise Flex docs specify p50/p90 credit burn for 13 capabilities — Deep Research ~33/~144, Advanced Agent Run ~150/~450 — while glean.com/pricing still 301-redirects to the homepage. Jasper published per-action credit costs (10 per Grid row, 100 per Optimization Agent run) with no dollar-per-credit rate at all.
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Apollo's per-endpoint credit table prices an outcome the caller cannot control: people enrichment costs 1 credit for demographics or email and 9 if a mobile phone is returned — a 9x swing decided by what Apollo finds, not by what the buyer asked for.
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Poolside published its first prices in two years — Laguna XS 2.1 at $0.06/$0.12 and Laguna S 2.1 at $0.10/$0.20 per 1M — on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway rather than on its own site, where /pricing still 404s. Observe.AI did the same thing: its own pricing page 404s while its AWS Marketplace listing publishes a fully metered contract at $4.80/minute and $12.00/interaction with no seat dimension at all.
For buyers
Treat 'published pricing' as two separate questions and ask both: what does an action consume, and what does a unit cost? A vendor that publishes only the meter has reserved the right to reprice you without editing a page anyone can diff — so get the dollar-per-unit rate into the contract even when the burn table is generous and the tier price is public. Where the burn rate depends on what the vendor finds rather than what you request, contract on the p90, not the headline: Apollo's 1-credit and 9-credit people-enrichment cases are the same API call, and Glean at least publishes both percentiles (Deep Research ~33 p50 vs ~144 p90). Before concluding a price is private, check the cloud marketplace — Observe.AI's own page 404s while its AWS listing carries $4.80/minute and $12.00/interaction, Poolside's only published prices ($0.06/$0.12 and $0.10/$0.20 per 1M) live on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway, and Usage AI's only surviving rate (20% of EC2 savings, 35% RDS-class) is on AWS Marketplace. Finally, capture withdrawn numbers before they vanish: Netlify's $500/mo floor, Moonshot's $599/yr/seat, Arize's ~$10/M-trace-span overage and Metronome's $100,000 included allotment are now negotiation anchors that exist only in archives.
For vendors
Publishing a meter without a rate buys less trust than it looks like it does — sophisticated buyers read a rate card with no dollar on it as a repricing option, not as transparency. If you run this play, at minimum publish percentiles rather than averages (Glean's p50/p90 per capability is the honest shape) and keep the schedule current as features change, which is real product work: HeyGen grew its credit-usage schedule to 16 rows and had to restate Video Agent from 20 to 30 credits/min, 90 in Seedance mode. Absolute allowances beat multipliers — Luma and Photoroom both replaced '4x usage' framing with hard credit totals at unchanged prices, which costs nothing and removes an entire class of support ticket. The stronger position is to publish both halves: HeyGen's $0.05/credit and Lindy's per-seat bands make the bill computable, and the counter-camp shows plain dollars still win discovery (Zilliz posted $126/GB/mo Dedicated and Enterprise from $197/mo, Freshworks put $49 per 100 bot sessions on a previously quote-only agent, You.com replaced an open-ended '>$2,000/1k calls' with a firm $1,200).
Outlook — what to watch
The trade is likely to persist for the simple reason that a meter is cheap to publish and a rate is where repricing happens — the meter satisfies the transparency question buyers ask, and the rate stays a private control. Watch three things. First, whether Glean or Jasper ever attaches a dollar to its published meter; either would be the clearest signal the sort is unwinding. Second, whether marketplace listings keep functioning as the disclosure surface of last resort — three corpus companies now publish more on AWS, OpenRouter or Vercel than on their own sites, which means any tracker that reads only vendor domains will score them as opaque. Third, the falsifier: a vendor publishing an enterprise floor while withdrawing a burn rate. No corpus company ran the sort backwards this window. The trend sharpens if the withdrawal column stays dollar-only for another cycle; it weakens if the plain-dollar camp grows past its current three, since Zilliz, Freshworks and You.com are the direct rebuttal.
Bottom line
Ten corpus companies withdrew a published price and fourteen published one for the first time in the same window — a wash on the binary question, and a coherent trade once you sort by what moved. Dollar-denominated floors and ceilings are coming off the page while per-action burn rates go on, which leaves buyers with a legible meter and an unknowable bill. That is weaker than either half alone, because the withheld half is exactly where the vendor reprices.
FAQ
Is AI pricing getting more transparent or less?
Neither — it is re-sorting. In one 2026 window across a 380-company corpus, 10 vendors removed a price they used to publish and 14 published one for the first time, so the binary count is a wash. What changed is the composition: dollar-denominated floors and ceilings (Netlify's $500/mo Enterprise floor, Moonshot's $599/yr/seat, Arize's ~$10-per-million-trace-span overage, Metronome's $100,000 included allotment) came off, while per-action consumption rates went on.
A vendor publishes a full credit rate card but no dollar price. Is that transparent?
No — it is the weakest of the three states, worse than publishing either half alone. Glean specifies p50/p90 credit burn for 13 capabilities while glean.com/pricing 301-redirects to the homepage; Jasper published per-action credit costs (10 per Grid row, 100 per Optimization Agent run) with no dollar-per-credit rate anywhere. In both cases the meter is fully legible and the bill is unknowable, which means the vendor can reprice you by changing what a credit costs without editing a page. Ask for the dollar value of a credit, in writing, and for whether that ratio is contractually fixed for the term.
The vendor's pricing page 404s. Is the price actually private?
Check the cloud marketplace and the model routers first. Observe.AI's own pricing page 404s while its AWS Marketplace listing publishes a fully metered contract — $4.80 per minute and $12.00 per interaction, with no seat dimension and, notably, no commitment discount (the 24-month price is exactly double the 12-month one). Poolside published its first prices in two years on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway while poolside.ai/pricing still 404s, and Usage AI's only surviving published rate (20% of EC2 savings, 35% on RDS-class) is on AWS Marketplace rather than usage.ai.
The published rate says an action costs 1–9 credits. How do I budget for that?
Budget the top of the range and negotiate on it, because a published range is not a forecast when the vendor decides the quantity. Apollo's people enrichment costs 1 credit for demographics or email and 9 if a mobile phone is returned — a 9x swing on the same API call, decided by what Apollo finds. Ask for the p90 rather than the headline, ask which of your actual queries land in the expensive branch, and get a cap or a true-up clause rather than assuming the low end.