๐ง๐ผ๐ธ๐ฒ๐ป ๐๐ถ๐น๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ ๐ฅ๐ข๐ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฏ๐น๐ฒ๐บ๐
AI billing changed. OpenAI and Anthropic moved to token-based costs. This move made the real price visible.
Uber used AI tools fast. They spent their annual budget in four months. Now they cap employees at 1,500 dollars per month. Brex limits engineers to 500 dollars per week. Other employees get 5 dollars per week. One company spent 500 million dollars in one month.
KPMG says only 26 percent of companies see their full AI costs. Flat rates hid errors. Those errors cost nothing before. Now every token costs money.
AI companies have huge debts for compute power. They need trillions in revenue to survive. Microsoft is cutting Anthropic use because the price is too high.
You need a plan for your engineering teams.
- Use real-time dashboards for token spend.
- Set spending caps before you scale.
- Link costs to results like merged pull requests.
- Fix loops in your AI workflows.
Separate your budget for experiments and proven ROI. This keeps your costs honest.
How do you track AI costs?
Source: https://dev.to/bh/token-based-billing-exposed-ais-roi-problem-what-the-real-numbers-say-22j3