Solheim AI
Your Own Private Dedicated LLM
A bunch of AI startups I spoke with recently have this perverse incentive of discouraging usage of their product.
They sell for a flat fee, but their own inference cost scales with usage.
Turns out on their most active users they had negative margins.
Changing their pricing to be a flat fee + token usage had their sales team struggling:
Closing clients without clear and predictable quotes is much harder.
The real fix for most: Get your own dedicated capacity, you can fix your unit economics and your incentives.
That is why I'm building Solheim: Reserve fixed capacity on a GPU for a flat monthly fee instead of per-token billing.
Predictable billing for predictable performance.
You trade elastic headroom for a ceiling, but capacity planning is much easier to solve than bad pricing -> Fix your product with engineering instead of financial acrobatics
1 Comment
The pricing tension is the strongest part here. When usage directly increases your own delivery cost, “predictable pricing” becomes an infrastructure problem, not just a packaging decision.