Today we are getting rid of monthly subscriptions at Eno PDF and moving to a simple credit-based system. It works like a prepaid cell phone plan. You top up your account $15 at a time. As you run AI searches, your credits slowly deplete. Based on our historical usage data, a single $15 top-up should last most users at least two months. Of course you can blow through $15 in a day if you are an absolute PDF fiend.
To thank all our early supporters, we are giving all existing accounts 5,000 credits ($15 worth) that are valid until the end of August. All of our paid subscribers will have their subscriptions cancelled and be granted paid credits equal to the last three months of their subscription payments. Existing enterprise customers will remain on their current plans but may contact us to learn more about new pricing terms going forward.
Pricing is a big thing that we have been talking about since we first started building Eno last summer. It seemed to us that the economics of AI companies were fundamentally different from any software company before them.
Specifically, AI companies have actual costs. They have to pay the model providers like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic for every token they pass through the large language models. This is different from old school SaaS companies from the 2010s where the hosting costs were trivial so all the revenue was basically profit.
Despite this, the most successful AI companies were still using a subscription model. We took a huge amount of inspiration from Cursor. At the time they had a simple $20/month subscription with an upgrade to a $60/month plan when you hit that limit.
We decided to copy Cursor’s model because it seemed to be working pretty well for them. We thought that maybe people like subscriptions because they provide price certainty (you know it will be $20/month, no more, no less). The only issue is that the price certainty is a lie. We learned this the hard way as we started to use Cursor a lot more. We hit the limit of our $20 Cursor subscription and upgraded to the $60 plan. Then we hit the limit on the $60 plan. After that, the only option was to switch to usage-based pricing! It seemed odd that the subscription had just been an illusion and the usage-based pricing was lurking there all along.
As we watched the stats come in from the early users of Eno PDF, we realized that most people’s usage patterns with PDFs are very spiky. We have lawyers who love Eno and use it every chance they get — but that still ends up with slow weeks and busy weeks. A monthly subscription doesn’t match the way people actually use the product. Allowing users to pay only when they use it made a lot more sense.
If we were a VC backed company, there may have been another facet to this discussion: how can we chase the next financing round by juicing the almighty Annual Recurring Revenue number when we don’t have subscription-based pricing? Well, we aren’t a VC backed company and we don’t need to chase the next round. Instead, we can give our customers a pricing model that actually makes sense.
We’re extremely excited that this new model makes Eno PDF more accessible than ever. If you haven’t already, we hope you’ll give it a try (new accounts start with 1,000 free credits). As always, you can download it for free at enopdf.com.
Happy pdfing,
Gordon & Seb
