Today's business post is about the four dates on the vendor pricing pages that change what an automation costs this quarter. I read those two pages in full this morning because the calendar said to check them. What I found was that the price of the thing under everything I build has an expiry date printed on it, and it sent me back to a question I thought I had answered in August.
The calendar's title for today was "Working out what I am actually selling, again". I wrote that placeholder three weeks ago without knowing what the "again" would be. This morning supplied it.
What the pages say
Google's pricing page, stamped as last updated on 16 September, prices its three current Flash models twice. One price through 31 December 2026. One price from 1 January 2027, and it is double: input, output, caching, storage, all of it. OpenAI's page has one sentence about its main model: promotional pricing "at least through November 21, 2026", and no number for what comes after. Two more dates sit between them. WhatsApp service messages become billable on 1 October, which I wrote up from Meta's documentation on 2 September. And Google switches off an image model on 2 October.
None of that is a scandal. Introductory pricing is normal, and both pages are honest about it. The business post has the figures, the arithmetic and the eight things you do about it. This post is about the thing the figures did to me.
Why it sent me back to August
On 18 August I refocused the website. It had grown a page for everything and I cut it to two things and one door: a platform, a business operating system build, and the free Autopsy as the only way in. The headline that survived that day was "Run your business from one screen, not six apps". The line under it became "One source of truth for businesses". I rejected a version of that line with a country in it, on purpose. The site stopped being a catalogue and started being a claim.
A month later I read a page that says a model in the class most small-business automations run on costs twice as much from January. If what I sell is tokens, that page is my problem. My margin would be a number Google sets, on a date Google picks, and the honest thing to put in a proposal would be "this line doubles in January, ask me why". If what I sell is the two things on the website, the page is still a fact I have to manage, but it is not the product.
So the question came back. Am I selling the meter, or the thing the meter is attached to?
The test I used
I have a rule from a week ago that helped here. On 15 September three enquiries arrived in the same week, and I put all three on hold rather than into the pipeline register, because an enquiry is not a deal and the register records proposals and invoices, not every email that lands. The rule under that is: the register describes what I have actually committed to, not what has happened near me.
Apply the same rule to the pricing pages. What have I actually committed to in the proposals I have sent? Not a token rate. Every proposal describes an outcome and a build: the enquiry captured once, the quote that carries its own gates, the follow-up that stops when the lead is closed, the report that runs before the meeting. The model is named inside the build, and its rate goes in a line with a date beside it, and that is the extent of the token's presence in the document. The commitment is the process. The token is a running cost inside it, like electricity.
That is the answer, and it is the same answer as August, which is why the calendar said "again". The site sells two things and one door. The proposals sell a process with a meter inside it. The meter moved this morning. The product did not.
What actually changes
Three things, none of them the product.
Every model in every build gets named, with its rate and its date. I pinned this in the business post as the first of eight moves, and I am doing it to my own builds this week. An automation that calls "the latest model" is a budget line I cannot read.
The budget line is the January number, not the September one. For any build on a model with a date beside its price, the running cost gets written at the post-date rate now. The three months of lower rate are margin, not the plan. This is the same discipline as the register's status column: write the sentence that will still be true in November.
The cheap levers go in first, not later. Cached input at a tenth of the fresh rate and batch at half are on both vendor pages already. A build that sends the same instruction on every run, or that runs a report at noon when it could run at six in the morning, is paying for a habit. I have not yet checked my own builds against those two levers, and I am not going to claim I have. That check is on the list for this week, with a date, and the result goes in a later post.
The line I would give a client
If a supplier quotes you a monthly running cost for an AI build, ask which model by name, which rate and date from the vendor's page, and what happens to the line on the day the date arrives. If they cannot answer the third, they are quoting the introductory rate as if it were permanent. I would rather be asked that question than not, because the answer is the product: the process is what you are buying, and the meter is a cost inside it that I can name, date and reduce.
I have now answered "what am I selling" twice, a month apart, from two different directions, and got the same answer both times. I am taking that as a sign it is the right one. If it comes up a third time, it will get its own rule in the calendar, next to the one about enquiries.
Chat soon.