Your card is already on file

Imagine paying for the agentic system of your choice the way we paid for software decades ago. A boxed perpetual license, version 1.0, yours forever (pick your vendor of preference here). Absurd, right? For something that changes weekly and bills by the token. And that's the point: the current AI revolution wouldn't be possible on that model. Not because of the tech. Because your credit card is already on file.

The last decade rewired how we pay, quietly and without much resistance. We stopped buying software and started renting it: Netflix, Spotify, Adobe, whatever SaaS your team runs on. A card on file, money leaving every month, nobody flinching. An agent that spends on our behalf only makes sense once "money leaves continuously and I'm fine with it" is already the default.

It also explains why the vendors are doing fine, despite all the claims that AI is hopelessly unprofitable. It's a softer version of the gym trick. Most of us actually do show up now — but we still barely scratch what we're paying for, while a small crowd of power users runs the GPUs hot. The light majority quietly subsidises the heavy few, and the flat monthly fee smooths the whole thing over.

And yet the pendulum isn't bolted in place. A few recent vendor moves to cap and gate access make me think the old model could creep back — access as a privilege you're granted, not a subscription you simply keep. We assume the direction of travel is settled; it rarely is.