Bot creators on Quora’s AI chatbot platform Poe now have another way to take home some cash. On Monday, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo unveiled a new financial arrangement in which creators get paid when a person chats with one of their bots. Bot creators are even able to set the amount that they’d like to earn for each message.
How is the money doled out? Chatting with Poe works on a point system. Free Poe users have a total of 3,000 points they can use each day, and each message chews up 20 points. Bot creators can see the number of message points that each bot has collected and then get paid in USD based on the total. For now, the program is available only to creators in the US, but Quora plans to expand it internationally.
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Revenue sharing is an important way for developers with high API fees and other costs to earn back some of their expenses, D’Angelo said. He hopes that the money earned by bot creators will help them set up custom knowledge bases to enhance their bots and expects to see earnings generated from bots focused on tutoring, knowledge, assistants, analysis, storytelling, and image generation.
To help bot creators keep track of their earnings, subscriptions, and messages, Quora has also rolled out a Poe analytics dashboard. The information in the dashboard aims to explain how the message pricing set by a creator affects bot usage and revenue.
Beyond the new per-message-revenue plan, Poe offers other ways to make money. Signing up for the Creator Monetization program lets you share in Poe’s overall revenue when users subscribe to and chat with your bots. You can earn as much as $100 per subscriber and $100 for every 1,000 messages. “Price per message represents the next phase of our creator monetization program and an important step forward in our goal of enabling a thriving economy with a wide diversity of AI products,” D’Angelo said.
Anyone interested in creating a bot on Poe should first read the company’s Welcome to Poe for Creators page. You can create two different styles of bots: prompt bots and server bots. A prompt bot is built on top of another bot, such as GPT-4 or Llama 2, and responds to users with plain-text instructions. A server bot is powered by a custom backend process that runs specific code in response to each message.
