Quora's Poe launches Pay per message revenue model for AI bot creators

Quora’s AI chatbot app Poe has introduced a new way for creators to generate revenue. Named ‘Price per message’, this mechanism enables creators to set a price for messages to their bots and generate revenue every time a user sends a message. 

Users will see prices expressed in terms of compute points, and messages to these bots will use the same points budget those users have as free users or paid subscribers.

Poe started in February 2023 and offers users a variety of AI chatbots from different companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The platform allows users to explore AI technologies in one place while providing Quora with new content. The company anticipates bots across a wide variety of domains to generate earnings, including tutoring, knowledge, therapy, entertainment, assistants, analysis, storytelling, roleplay, and image generation. 

In the blog, Quora’s CEO Adam D'Angelo mentioned that the goal is to enable a wide variety of creators to develop and operate them while building real businesses. This new feature builds on Poe's existing program, launched in 2023, where bot creators earned a share of Poe's premium subscription fees when their bots were used.

D'Angelo also explained, “This pricing mechanism is particularly important for anyone developing a bot that has significant server costs, whether that is because of the need to pay for GPUs for inference, or because generating a response requires API calls that get expensive at scale. We want to enable a large and thriving ecosystem of model developers and bot creators who build on top of those models and we think the ability to cover the operational costs of running a bot is a key component of that.”

However, even for prompt bots where Poe covers the operating costs, this same per-message price mechanism is now available to all creators. They need to provide bots that users find valuable enough to use at higher point levels. 

This ability to generate revenue creates an opportunity to invest in creating custom knowledge bases with particularly valuable information for a bot to have access to, or make other investments to create a valuable experience. Across all types of bots on Poe, Quora is on a run rate to spend tens of millions of dollars this year on payments, and that will continue to grow as Poe usage grows, according to D'Angelo.

Creators can edit each bot’s per-message price in settings. If they are unsure about the price to set, the focus should be on what is needed to cover the per-message costs, and to only increase it later once they have usage. 

At the end of each pay period, creators will receive the sum of their message earnings. They can view the total messages and total earnings accumulated per bot on the Creators page on the poe.com desktop website.

In addition to launching price per message, the company is also introducing an updated analytics dashboard for more comprehensive bot usage tracking. This filterable dashboard updates daily and tracks average earnings across paywalls, subscriptions, and messages over specified timeframes.

While the price per message is currently limited to creators in the US, Quora plans to expand to additional countries and regions soon.