Poe Rolls Out ‘Price Per Message’ Generative AI Chatbot Monetization
Generative AI chatbot hub Poe has begun allowing creators to monetize their chatbots with the new “price per message” system. The system, first mentioned when the company began testing monetizing the chatbots, allows creators to set a cost in compute points that users must pay to interact with the bot, which can then be turned into cash.
Poe Profit
Today we’re introducing a new way for model developers and bot creators to generate revenue on @poe_platform: price per message! Creators can now set a per-message price for their bots and generate revenue every time a user messages them. Thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/yx5mKgGoSQ
— Adam D’Angelo (@adamdangelo) April 8, 2024
Quora, the crowdsourced Q&A forum behind Poe, is essentially creating a flexible market for chatbot creators reminiscent of the Apple App or Alexa Skills Stores. Quora anticipates that the new setup will bring in revenue across many domains, including education, mental health, entertainment, and image production. Creators can edit the per-message price for each of their bots through the settings. It’s not just messages that can be monetized, either, there’s also the subscription option where the price is split between the chatbot maker and Poe.
Poe recommends initially setting prices to cover per-message costs and increasing them later based on usage and demand. At the end of each pay period, creators will receive the sum of their message earnings. An updated analytics dashboard on the Poe website will provide comprehensive bot usage tracking and earnings data. While the price per message feature is currently limited to creators in the U.S., Poe plans to expand availability to additional countries and regions soon.
The compute points setup is the same economic system as is used by Poe to ration the use of its chatbots for users. The payment in the same terms is supposed to be enticing for creators as generative AI chatbots can be expensive in terms of server costs and processing demands. The goal is to help the creators cover those operational costs. The option is available even for chatbots built directly on Poe, which is supported by the company directly. Regardless, the compute points can be converted into cash. The expanded monetization may lead to a lot more Poe usage online and through mobile devices. Poe has rapidly scaled up its presence with an API and features like voice input, threading, and image generation. Poe now has millions of users chatting with bots worldwide.
“This pricing mechanism is particularly important for anyone developing a bot that has significant server costs, whether that is because of the need to pay for GPUs for inference, or because generating a response requires API calls that get expensive at scale,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo explained in a blog post. “We will be happy for you to make money if you provide bots that users find valuable enough to use at higher point levels. This ability to generate revenue creates an opportunity to invest in creating custom knowledge bases with particularly valuable information for a bot to have access to, or make other investments to create a truly unique and valuable experience. Across all types of bots on Poe, we are already on a run rate to spend tens of millions of dollars this year on payments, and that will continue to grow as Poe usage grows.”
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