Work-Unit Pricing
Pricing where the customer pays for a unit of work they recognize (an invoice processed, a report prepared, a ticket resolved) rather than a technical unit such as a token or a call; often implemented through credits that buy that work.
AI and GrowthTerm 77 / 81
In practice
The line from a16z's Erten and Wang (August 2026) gets to the heart of it: a credit is a currency, not a value metric; what matters is what the credit buys. In their survey of 50 technical AI buyers, 27 preferred credits tied to recognizable work and 14 preferred tokens; a small survey, not a measure of prevalence. Their advice is to price at the highest layer of value you can reliably measure, attribute and defend. For growth, a work unit ties the customer's bill to the growth of their own work; but set the credit's exchange rate wrong and you carry your heavy-usage segment at a loss (our reading).