There's a piece going around in The Chronicle of Higher Education about AI getting more expensive on campus.
The short version: existing pricing models for institutions buying software is changing. It's worth reading. But one line in it is what I keep coming back to:
When campuses pay a flat rate for every student and professor, many of those subscriptions go unused.
Jeffrey R. Young - Chronicles of Higher Education
That's the part of the model we've never been comfortable with.
When you buy a bunch of licenses, the vendor makes the most money on the people who never log in. You pay per license but what happens when a majority of those licenses go unused? That’s is pure profit. The less you use it, the better it is for them.
Our Chief Learning Officer, Rob Peregoodoff, who had been part of the many enterprise-level negotiations with the University of British Columbia, long believed that an FTE model like this does not lead to long-term success and strong student impact.
We pay our own bills on a meter, meaning that every grade and every piece of feedback our platform consumes tokens and we pay for those tokens. A model where we profit when no value is given to our partners is unethical.
Starting soon, Admin users on TimelyGrader will see two new items on their Admin dashboard.
The Admin Dashboard will become available for all institution this Thursday, Jun 18th, at 4PM PST.
There is no better problem than an institution using our platform too much and exceeding their cap. That’s how we would rather earn the university’s business and renewal. We are committed to working with our partners to negotiate a win-win in this new paradigm, including transparency around usage and RoI. Your success is our success.
