Vercel

Monetizing AI — Alvaro Morales, Orb

Jul 23, 2025 · 18:18

Alvaro Morales, CEO of Orb, argues that traditional subscription-based SaaS pricing fails for AI products due to rapid cost fluctuations, margin pressures, and customer demand for clear ROI. He presents three frameworks: decide between direct monetization (add-on, bundled) or indirect (free to drive upsells) using examples like GitHub Copilot, Notion AI, and Expedia; select a value metric from resource-based tokens (Vercel's v0) to task-based (Zapier) to outcome-based pricing (Intercom's Fin at $0.99 per resolved ticket); and embrace continual experimentation, as AI pricing cycles shrink from years to months. To reduce pricing guesswork, Orb built Simulations, a tool that lets companies backtest alternate pricing strategies on real usage data from closed betas before launch, helping teams like Replit and Perplexity optimize revenue without risking customer trust.

Using OSS models to build AI apps with millions of users — Hassan El Mghari

Jul 15, 2025 · 18:47

Hassan El Mghari, a software engineer at Together.ai, explains how he builds open source AI apps that attract millions of users, including roomGPT.io (2.9 million users), restorePhotos.io (1.1 million), Blinkshot.io (1 million visitors), and LlamaCoder.io (1.4 million visitors). He details his simple four-step tech stack: user input, a single API call to an open source model on Together.ai, storing results in a database, and displaying output. His process emphasizes keeping ideas simple enough to describe in five words, spending 80% of time on UI, launching early, and incorporating the latest models like Fluxionel for virality. He advises naming apps with short, memorable names, making them free and open source to encourage sharing, and iterating rapidly—most apps fail, but the key is to keep building. He funds compute through sponsorships from Together.ai and partners like Neon and Clerk, which provide free services for his open source projects.

The Demo I Wish I'd Had: OpenAI's Agents SDK... serverless! - Brook Riggio

Jun 3, 2025 · 17:51

Brook Riggio demonstrates deploying AI agent workflows on Vercel's serverless platform using OpenAI's Agents SDK and Inngest orchestration. He presents a reference architecture: Next.js frontend triggers Inngest events that invoke Python agents on Vercel serverless functions, with automatic retries and step-level observability. His demo builds a newsletter generator: users enter topics, a research agent scans news, a formatting agent structures the content, and results save to Vercel blob storage while the frontend polls for completion. He highlights that Vercel automatically detects Python functions without a config file, and Inngest's step.run ensures reliable execution within serverless time limits. The talk emphasizes cost efficiency (pay only for actual execution), full type safety via Pydantic and TypeScript, and easy integration of long-running agent tasks. The open-source repo is available for fork and contributions.