Pi Network (PI) ended Monday its flat fee of 0.25 PI for creating and modifying applications in its AI-boosted App Studio, shifting most creators to variable pricing.
Key points:
The Core Team adopted a usage-based pricing model for App Studio on August 24, replacing the 0.25 PI charged for each app creation and update.
Creators whose applications attract “real” users beyond their own testing keep the former subsidized rate, with eligibility reassessed over time.
The PI price remains stuck around $0.09 while the broader crypto market has strongly rebounded over the past seven days.
Big overhaul of Pi App Studio pricing
The team behind the “mobile mining” project confirmed that the switch took place on August 24, about a week after presenting the setup in a blog post. Until now, creators paid 0.25 PI to generate an app through the tool, then another 0.25 PI for each modification. These prices were far below the real cost of the underlying AI services, with the difference discreetly covered by the network during the launch phase.
The standard pricing scale is now indexed directly to these AI costs: the amount billed varies depending on the computing resources used by each request. Pi says it takes no margin on the costs of the AI services, meaning the bill will depend on the complexity of the creation or modification being requested.
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Why some Pi developers keep the subsidy
Not all developers move to the new pricing tier. Creators whose apps attract a meaningful volume of distinct users—beyond just their internal tests—keep the subsidized pricing applied since the launch. The team said it would apply an initial set of eligibility criteria to the existing App Studio data to build an initial list of beneficiaries.
Not being eligible right away isn’t final: eligibility will be reviewed regularly, and developers who later manage to generate real usage can re-enter the most favorable tier.
Several articles have framed this change more as a filter rather than as a true price increase, aimed at the long tail of applications created for testing, experimentation, or spam. The project has been hammering for months that its ecosystem needs apps that people actually open, rather than a broad catalog of inactive listings. The new pricing model now aligns economic incentives with that message.
PI’s price is hovering around $0.09
The timing is unfortunate. Bitcoin (BTC) jumped about 22% over the week ending August 21, its best seven-day performance since March 2024, driven by a short squeeze and steady inflows into the ETFs, which lifted the whole market. For its part, PI has barely benefited.
The token was trading around $0.089 on Tuesday, still stuck below the $0.09 mark—a level it has repeatedly failed to reclaim sustainably. Technical analysts are now watching the $0.10–$0.11 area as the next major resistance. PI spent most of August in a tight range, between roughly $0.078 and $0.09, after a slide to a late-July historical low near $0.071, leaving it about 97% below its February 2025 peak.
Coming up: Eric Trump denies the rumor of a new token, while three Trump tokens remain far from their highs