We’re going to stop using Fin AI. It’s a shame because the product itself is really good, but the pricing isn’t suited to marketplace business models like ours.
With margins of around €1 per user per month (incl. VAT) and high volumes, the cost quickly becomes unsustainable.
If possible, it would be great to share this feedback with your product teams internally — there’s likely a broader pricing vs. business model fit issue for marketplaces.
+8
What inspired you to start using Fin in the first place and what was the deciding factor to stop? Did you feel the ROI was there when you started even though your margins were low?
Also it takes a lot of Fin usage to create $12k in costs, you must have a very active community of people using your services that either aren’t paying or not paying enough to make it viable but what are you switching to, back to human customer support? How much will that cost you?
I think for the team to share this feedback they would need to understand more about the situation, what problem were you trying to solve? why wasn’t it sustainable? what do you think needs to change to better support your needs?
I think Fin should work well in a marketplace setting, your spend should be a return on investment helping customers and freeing up the team’s time but if it wasn’t then the question is why not?
Thanks for the follow-up — let me add a bit more context.
Regarding the $12k, this was roughly $1k per month over about a year, not a short spike. We intentionally limited Fin to ~10% of our total support volume to keep costs under control and evaluate ROI gradually.
Even with this limited scope, two issues stood out:
Mismatch between cost and actual value delivered
In a non-trivial number of cases, we were billed even though:
Fin didn’t respond to the customer,
or provided an incorrect or low-quality answer,
or the conversation was reopened by the customer via another thread or channel, still requiring human intervention.
In those situations, the cost was real, but the value — for both the customer and our support team — was low or nonexistent.
Difficulty maintaining a sustainable unit economics model at scale
Even with only 10% of the volume handled by Fin, the model wasn’t sustainable given our very low unit margins. Increasing usage enough to meaningfully “free up” the support team would have driven costs to a level incompatible with our marketplace economics.
To be clear, this isn’t about AI vs. human support — there is always a cost either way. The issue is having a predictable, controllable cost that is proportional to the value created. In a low-margin, high-volume marketplace, usage-based pricing combined with these “low or zero value” billing cases makes the equation hard to balance.
That’s why we’re moving toward a more hybrid and tightly controlled model, rather than increasing our exposure to Fin.
Hope this helps clarify the situation and provides actionable feedback for the product team.
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