Pay-per-use vs subscription: why Frenchie ships flat $1 = 100 credits

Your AI agent's work doesn't fit a subscription shape. Some days it parses three invoices, some weeks it transcribes ten hours of calls, some months it generates a hundred blog covers. A monthly fee either overcharges the quiet days or underprices the busy ones. Pay-per-use is just honest about what your agent actually does.

Pricing is one of those choices where the decision shape matters more than the specific number you land on. A $9/month plan and a $19/month plan are different numbers on the same structure. A $9/month plan and a pay-as-you-go model are different structures entirely.

We picked pay-as-you-go for Frenchie early, and we think the reasoning is worth writing down. Not because $1 for 100 credits is the universally correct answer — it isn't — but because the logic that gets you there is portable to other narrow tools facing the same decision.

The shapes of pricing

There are really only three shapes available to a software product in 2026:

• Flat subscription. $29/month gets you the product. Predictable revenue for you, predictable cost for the customer. The default in SaaS.
• Tiered subscription. $29/month gets you X, $99/month gets you 3X, $299/month gets you enterprise features. Lets you capture more value from high-usage customers.
• Pay-as-you-go (usage-based). You pay for what you consume, period. Predictable cost-per-unit, unpredictable total spend.

There are hybrids — subscription with usage caps, usage with volume commits — but they're all variants of these three. Most SaaS companies default to tiered subscription because it's what the previous SaaS company did. That's not a reason, it's an echo.

What makes a product a good fit for pay-as-you-go

Usage-based pricing works best when three conditions hold:

1. Usage varies wildly across customers. Some people use it once a month, others use it hundreds of times a day. A monthly fee either overcharges the low users (who leave) or undercharges the high users (who cost you money).
2. The value scales with usage. Each unit consumed produces roughly the same amount of value for the customer. Not always true — some products have diminishing returns on the 100th use — but for most file-processing workflows, unit value is pretty flat.
3. Unit cost is low and predictable. The customer can reason about "how much will 50 OCR pages cost me?" without a calculator, a sales call, or a consultation.

Frenchie hits all three. Some customers OCR five invoices a week. Others transcribe 40 hours of calls a month. Others have their agent generate 200 product mockups before a launch. The value per page, per minute, or per image is basically constant. And $0.01 per page / $0.02 per minute / $0.20 per image is a unit cost anyone can estimate in their head.

Run the same checklist on a collaboration tool like Slack, and usage-based pricing makes less sense — all three conditions break. Subscription is the right shape there.

What breaks with subscription for a product like Frenchie

We ran the numbers on subscription pricing early. The shape kept breaking in one of two ways:

• Too low a floor. A $10/month plan covers a thousand OCR pages. Most casual users won't hit that. They pay $120/year for something they use a few times and mostly forget about. They leave after six months because they can't justify the line item. You never build a long-term relationship with the exact people you most want to help — indie devs, small teams, someone experimenting with an agent workflow.
• Too high a floor. A $49/month plan prices out everyone who isn't already sure they need the product. You never capture the long tail of "I'd try it if it were cheap." A product that only works for enterprise customers isn't a product we want to build.

Tiered subscription combines the downsides. Now you have three plans your customers have to compare, a feature matrix that turns into a sales surface, and price anchoring that pushes everyone to the plan you want them on instead of the one they need. We didn't want to build a product that requires a pricing page explainer.

What pay-per-use actually looks like

Frenchie's pricing is five lines:

• $1 = 100 credits.
• 1 credit per OCR page.
• 2 credits per transcription minute.
• 20 credits per generated image.
• 100 free credits on signup, no card required.

That's the whole pricing sheet. Every job costs what it costs. No plans to compare, no feature matrix, no commit, no renewal. If you use Frenchie once a quarter for a one-off PDF, it costs you cents. If you use it every day for a bookkeeping workflow, it costs you dollars.

The other piece that matters: credits don't expire. You can top up once, let the balance sit for a year, use it when you need to. We don't play the "unused credits reset monthly" game — that's a subscription in a trench coat, and we don't want to be that.

The downsides we chose

Pay-per-use has real downsides. We took them on knowingly.

• Revenue is harder to predict. Customers don't commit to a monthly fee. Cash flow is bumpier. We have less visibility into next quarter's revenue. This is a real business problem — we just decided the customer-experience benefit was worth more than the operational convenience.
• Unit economics have to actually work at the low end. We can't rely on a subscription averaging out heavy and light users. Each unit has to be priced high enough to cover its cost, including the capacity we can't perfectly utilize. We've been ruthless about keeping our infrastructure cost per unit down so the price can stay low.
• No floor means no guaranteed revenue per user. A customer who tries Frenchie and churns costs us the same acquisition effort as a customer who stays for years. We need conversion and retention to pay for itself, without the cushion of a minimum monthly fee.
• Enterprise conversations are weirder. When someone asks "do you have an annual contract?" the honest answer is "not really, but email us if volume matters." That's fine for the customers we want; it's a hurdle for the ones who need procurement-shaped pricing. We'll get there when it matters; we're not rushing it.

When this is the wrong answer

Pay-per-use isn't universally correct. If your product is a platform that takes weeks to onboard, subscription is probably right — the switching cost is high enough that customers want the predictability of a fixed fee. If your product has heavy marginal cost per call (like a vision model or a reasoning-heavy workflow), you need to be careful that per-unit pricing actually covers your costs before optimizing for experience.

For a narrow utility that users can try in five minutes and integrate in one command, pay-per-use removes the biggest objection to trying it. That's the game we're playing.

What you get from this

A product you can try for free, pay for when you use it, stop paying for when you don't. No meetings, no plans, no gotchas. If that sounds like the kind of tool you'd rather have in your stack, sign up for 100 free credits and see if Frenchie fits. The 100 is on us; everything after is cheaper than you'd expect.

We've also put usage examples on the pricing page — a scanned book, a podcast, a month of daily standups, a year of invoices — so the abstract credit math becomes concrete dollar amounts before you commit anything.