We Flirted With Tokens. Now VirtualSpaces Is Going Back To Fiat.

We didn’t come into this space as pricing experts.

We came in as builders. We’re technical. We care about systems.

And like many people in AI, we fell in love with tokens a little too quickly. Tokens felt elegant.

They matched how the models work. They let us get very “granular” about cost.

They signalled that VirtualSpaces and Foursite were “modern” products.

Then we started doing the boring but honest thing: talking to people who actually sign budgets.

They weren’t excited. They were confused. They were trying to map “millions of tokens” back to the very simple questions that matter:

• How much per month?

• What happens if this thing succeeds?

• Where does this sit in my P&L?

The more we spoke with operators, the clearer it became. Token-first pricing was creating anxiety instead of confidence. People were experimenting less, not more. They were holding back rollouts because no one wanted to own the unknown.

That’s not the kind of surface area we want our product to create. So we’re doing something unfashionable.

We’re moving VirtualSpaces back to fiat pricing.

• Clear currency.

• Clear tiers.

• Clear expectations.

Behind the scenes, yes, we still think in tokens. We still optimize workloads. We still care about efficiency.

But we no longer ask customers to think like our infrastructure.

We meet them where their decisions are actually made: in their own currency and in their own language.

This blog post is our attempt to tell that story openly.

Read more: AI token based system causing cognitive dissonance

We talk about why tokens created cognitive dissonance for teams, what we learned the hard way, and why we believe the next wave of durable AI products will treat clarity, not cleverness, as the real moat.

If you’re building, backing, or buying AI products, I think it will resonate.

Because this isn’t just about pricing.

We're also transitioning our existing customer base back to fiat. We have decided to err on the side of our customers.

It’s about trust.

Cheers!