Tagged economics
6 essays
- When code gets cheap, the mockup loses its job Design tools earned their place by making expensive decisions cheap before anyone wrote code. Code is cheap now, so there is less reason to decide anywhere else, and Figma's market moved even while its product got better.
- Cheap intelligence makes the incumbents richer Cheap intelligence does not destroy value; it relocates it. Follow the money down the stack as the model commoditises and it lands in the layers a falling token price can't reach: proprietary data, workflow lock-in, distribution. The SaaS apocalypse is real and aimed at the wrong layer. It comes for the thin wrappers and the pure-model labs; the incumbent with a real moat just got a cheaper engine bolted into it.
- The bet against itself Intelligence is deflating about fifty times a year, and the companies that make it are filing to go public at the largest valuations in history. The contradiction resolves once you see that none of them is priced as a model company: Anthropic is an enterprise bet, OpenAI a distribution bet, xAI a compute bet. Each is worth a trillion dollars only to the degree it can stop being the thing it is famous for.
- Google wins consumer AI on distribution Models are getting cheap and similar to each other. Once that finishes, the winner is whoever already has the users and can afford to give the thing away. Google has both.
- The unit economics of a one-person AI product About 40% of what it costs me to run hey anna is the Claude API bill. Most SaaS advice assumes serving one more customer is free, and it stops working once that isn't true. Free trials get expensive and going viral can hurt.
- Stated versus revealed preference, in booking data Ask people what holiday they want and they'll describe something longer and fancier than the one they book. I had the survey answers and the transactions for the same customers, so I could measure the gap. It's large and predictable.