Bot creators now have a fresh opportunity to earn money through Poe, the AI chatbot platform owned by Quora. On Monday, the company rolled out a new revenue model where creators can set a price for each message their bots receive, allowing them to generate income every time a user interacts with their creation. This new addition comes after the launch of a revenue-sharing program in October 2023, which gives bot creators a portion of the profits when users subscribe to Poe’s premium product.
Launched in February 2023, Poe provides users with a variety of AI chatbots to experiment with, including popular ones from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The platform aims to make it easy for consumers to try out new AI technologies in one place, while also giving Quora a potential source of fresh content.
The company’s revenue models offer a unique twist on the creator economy by rewarding both AI enthusiasts who create “prompt bots” and developers who build server bots that integrate with Poe’s AI.
Last fall, Quora announced its plans for a revenue-sharing program with bot creators and hinted at the upcoming ability for creators to set a per-message fee. However, it’s been almost five months since the announcement – hardly a “soon” release. But now, the latter feature is finally going live.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo shared on Monday that Poe users will see message points for each bot, which are equivalent to the points of a free user or a Poe subscriber. However, creators will be paid in dollars for these points.
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce a new way for model developers and bot creators to earn money on poe.com: price per message! Creators now have the ability to set a price for each message their bots receive, allowing them to generate income each time a user interacts with their creation. Thread 👇
“This pricing mechanism is crucial for developers with significant model inference or API costs,” D’Angelo elaborated in a post on X. “Our goal is to foster a thriving ecosystem of model developers and bot creators, and covering these operational costs is a key element of that,” he added.
The introduction of this new revenue model could ignite the development of novel bot types, including ones for tutoring, knowledge, virtual assistants, analysis, storytelling, and even image generation, D’Angelo predicts.
While the new revenue model is currently only available for bot creators in the U.S., it will eventually expand globally. It joins the creator monetization program, which pays up to $20 for each user that subscribes to Poe through a creator’s bot.
Alongside the per-message revenue model, Poe has also launched an enhanced analytics dashboard that showcases average earnings for creators’ bots across paywalls, subscriptions, and messages. These insights are updated daily and provide creators with better insights into how their pricing strategies impact bot usage and revenue.
