In the AI Era, Defending Revenue Behind Expensive Subscriptions Is a Dead Strategy

After reading a16z’s The Cinderella Glass Slipper Effect and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Scaling an AI Supernova: Lessons from Anthropic, Cursor, and fal, I became convinced: the survival playbook for AI startups has fundamentally changed from what worked before.

The signals run directly counter to the high-price strategies we see from legacy SaaS players like Similarweb or even Claude Code’s $200/month tier.

Emerging powerhouses like Genspark and Higgsfield are absorbing GPU costs far higher than traditional SaaS infrastructure - yet they’re offering aggressive, unlimited usage. There’s a clear logic behind these moves.

COGS Is the New CAC

AI services are expensive to run. But these companies realized something critical: rather than burning massive ad budgets to convince users, it’s cheaper and far more effective to spend that money letting users experience overwhelming capability firsthand. In other words, high server costs are the most efficient ad spend there is.

Isolation Today Is More Dangerous Than Losses Tomorrow

If you erect a pricing wall to protect short-term cash flow, users never even get the chance to test whether your service fits their workflow - what we might call Workload-Model Fit. The winning strategy is to let people use your product freely until it becomes an irreplaceable work habit. That kind of lock-in is far more powerful than any paid marketing campaign.

The Glass Slipper Has to Be Tried On

As a16z put it, if you want to become the user’s “Cinderella glass slipper” - the tool that solves their specific problem - they have to try it on first. A premium service locked behind a closed door will never become anyone’s must-have.

What matters more than defending today’s margins is occupying the user’s time.

Is your service hiding behind a price tag, or is it running at your users’ fingertips every single day?

• a16z: The Cinderella Glass Slipper Effect
• BVP: Scaling an AI Supernova