Users go on vacation, they slack off, they spend the day talking to each other. There are very few people who are really effective at burning tokens. how do you know the ratio? do you have insides? No :)

The biggest target is enterprise, and the economics for an LLM vendor look like this: price per token = R&D + inference + infra investments. When you buy a subscription, you are quite often buying a year ahead. That lets the vendor predict future infra investments against hard commitments, and sell expensive per token pricing to everyone else. And when a hard commitment sits unused because the user is busy, they sell it twice. It is loyalty in exchange for predictability, in exchange for the promise to always deliver SOTA to users.

Vendors control the harness. Tomorrow they simply roll out a router where reading the code and doing the final edits goes to a cheaper model, and their math suddenly becomes very sexy.

Isn't that hard to predict that their economic model is very easy to tune? and this is just first baby steps.

I personally pay per token ( do not have subs for work ). I did have once a $25k/mo worth of tokens, since i knew it was free so i was doing crazy experiments. Now , 2 month later, my bill was barely $1.5k since i moved into different stage with project. I do have team members who burn $500-600. pre router, pre optimization.

I switched recently to grok 4.5 and cursor router and my bill will go even further down. It rotates 4-5 different vendor models cheap and expensive too, depends on the task. Routers will flip entire LLM economy upside down.

>Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that's both metered and with hard to measure costs.

Has Ed Zitron not heard about the cloud? Unpredictable AWS bills?

Curious that he references a METR study from July 2025, before the leap in model and harness performance towards the end of 2025/early 2026.

Just more wishful thinking from our favorite AI skeptic

The best price for a product is what I call the "suck air through your teeth" price. You want your customers to suck air through their teeth... and then pay the full amount anyway.

Uber set their per-developer token allowance to $1500 per developer per tool. That suggests to me that they think they can get at least that much ROI out of AI tooling.

Selling $1500/employee/month plans to companies is a great business to be in.