They are grouped by the question each one answers. The ones marked as born with AI did not work at scale before it. Where we have looked at a model closely, against the filings of the companies that run it, its name links to that analysis.
Choice 1
Who pays
Who pays, and is the payer the person who uses it?
- Advertising-funded
- The reader or viewer pays nothing; advertisers pay for their attention. The product is the audience.
- Two-sided marketplace
- A platform brings two groups together, buyers and sellers or riders and drivers, and charges one side or both for the match. Read the analysis →
- Affiliate and referral fees
- A site earns a commission each time it sends a customer to someone else's checkout.
- Cross-subsidy
- One product is priced low, or given away, and another product pays for it.
- Data licensing
- A company sells or rents access to data it collects in the course of its business.
- Training-data licensingBorn with AI
- A publisher or platform licenses its archive to the companies that train AI models. Read the analysis →
Choice 2–3
What is sold, and how it is priced
Is the customer buying access, use, output or an outcome, and how is that counted?
- Metered intelligenceBorn with AI
- An AI company charges by use: customers pay for the tokens their requests consume, at a price set by the model they choose. Read the analysis →
- Outcome pricingBorn with AI
- The customer pays per result, a resolved support ticket or a qualified lead, rather than per seat or per hour. Read the analysis →
- The copilot tierBorn with AI
- An AI assistant sold as an add-on to existing software, priced above the base seat. Read the analysis →
- Subscription
- Customers pay a recurring fee for continued access, whatever they use in a given month. Read the analysis →
- Usage-based pricing
- The bill follows consumption: gigabytes stored, minutes used, transactions processed. Read the analysis →
- Freemium
- A free version brings users in; a paid version, with more features or capacity, earns the money. Read the analysis →
- Tiered pricing
- The same product sold in good, better and best versions, so each customer picks the price they are willing to pay.
- Flat rate
- One price for unlimited use, which trades a predictable bill for the risk of heavy users.
- Software licensing
- The customer buys the right to use software, usually paying up front and then yearly for maintenance.
- Add-on and upsell
- A base product at an attractive price, with the margin made on the extras sold alongside it.
- Razor and blade
- The device is sold cheaply and the refills, the cartridges or the consumables carry the profit.
- Dynamic pricing and auctions
- Prices move with demand, set by an algorithm or by bidders, so the same item costs different amounts at different times.
- Product as a service
- The customer pays for what a product does, hours of flight or meters of light, while the seller keeps ownership of the product.
- Rental and leasing
- Customers pay to use an asset for a period instead of buying it outright.
Choice 4
Who does the work
People, software, partners, the customer, or an agent?
- Services as softwareBorn with AI
- The seller delivers the finished work, a reconciled ledger or a drafted contract, done by software instead of a team.
- Digital laborBorn with AI
- AI agents are priced, deployed and managed like staff, to take on whole roles or tasks. Read the analysis →
- Forward-deployed engineering
- Software sold together with engineers who sit with the customer and make it work in their business. Read the analysis →
- Self-service
- Customers do part of the work themselves, ordering, configuring or assembling, in exchange for a lower price.
- User-generated content
- Users create what other users come to see, and the platform earns from the traffic.
- Crowdsourcing
- Work is spread across a large outside crowd and paid by the task.
- Managed services
- A provider runs a function for the customer, IT or payroll, under a long contract with agreed service levels. Read the analysis →
- Franchising
- The owner of a brand and a system licenses both to local operators, who pay fees and royalties.
- White label and private label
- One company makes the product; another puts its own brand on it and sells it.
Choice 5
Where the margin comes from
Which cost line decides whether the model pays?
- Compute resaleBorn with AI
- A company buys or leases computing power, often from chip makers or data center owners, and rents it to AI developers. Read the analysis →
- AI-enabled roll-upBorn with AI
- An acquirer buys service businesses and runs them on AI to widen their margins.
- Low-cost, no frills
- Strip the product down to what customers will not do without, and win on price.
- Vertical integration
- Own more steps of the chain, from inputs to the customer, to control cost, quality or supply.
- Asset-light
- Leave the heavy assets, the hotels or the trucks, to others, and keep the brand, the software or the customer.
- Specialist supplier
- Be the best at one layer of an industry and sell it to everyone who needs it. Read the analysis →
- Integrated solutions
- Bundle products and services into one answer to a customer's problem, and charge for the whole.
- Mass customization
- Make each order to the customer's specification at close to mass-production cost.
- Long tail
- Sell a little of a great many niche items, where shelf space or inventory is cheap.
- Open source with paid services
- Give the software away, and charge for hosting, support or enterprise features.
- Buy and build
- Acquire many small companies in a fragmented industry and combine them into one.
Choice 6
How it finds and keeps customers
Where do customers come from, and what brings them back?
- Distribution captureBorn with AI
- An answer engine or assistant keeps the customer on its own page instead of sending them on, and keeps the value of the visit.
- Direct to consumer
- The maker sells straight to the customer, cutting out the wholesaler and the retailer.
- Marketplace and e-commerce
- Selling online, through your own store or someone else's marketplace.
- Aggregator
- Gather supply from many providers in one place and own the customer's starting point. Read the analysis →
- Channel partners and resellers
- Other companies sell your product to their own customers, for a margin or a fee.
- Loyalty programs
- Reward customers for coming back, and learn what they buy as you do.
- Ecosystem lock-in
- Products that work best together make leaving any one of them costly.
- Installed base
- Earn the profit over years from the products already in customers' hands: service, parts and upgrades.
Choice 7
What stops a copy
Why can't a rival copy the model next year?
- Network effects
- Each new user makes the product more valuable to every other user.
- Proprietary data
- Data no rival can buy or gather, which makes the product better than any copy. Read the analysis →
- Switching costs
- The cost, effort or risk of changing supplier keeps customers in place.
- Brand
- A name customers trust enough to choose it, and to pay more for it.
- Economies of scale
- The bigger the operation, the lower the cost of each unit, which smaller rivals cannot match. Read the analysis →
- Licenses and regulation
- A permit, a patent or a rule that only a few companies hold keeps others out.
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