Companies Quintuple Token Spend Amid AI ROI Concerns

Companies quintupled their token spend in the first half of the year according to SaaStr.

Token Spend Growth and Revenue Questions

Almost nobody can point to the revenue lift that justified the increase. The discussion was recorded on the last day of June. Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase post stated AI spend was down 50% this quarter while usage was up, driven by a shift to open-source models.

A SaaStr Fund portfolio company hit its first-half plan and sought to double token spend at its board meeting. Approval was tied to ROI for the first time, but the team could not draw the line from the spend to revenue curves.

Software Acceleration Principle

Software companies in the age of AI are either accelerating or irrelevant. Adobe announced $500M of agentic revenue and then missed the quarter. Aaron Levie at Box ties AI messaging to revenue and the business model, returning the company to double-digit growth.

Anthropic Run Rate and Open Source Issues

Anthropic went from a $1B run rate at the start of last year to $9B by year end to $44B mid this year according to SaaStr. The bulk of tokens may shift to open-source models while the bulk of revenue still comes from frontier models.

Anthropic wrote to the Senate Banking Committee alleging Chinese open-source companies are distilling models by sending millions of prompts and recording answers. The bulk of revenue still comes from state-of-the-art frontier models according to SaaStr.