this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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So the token nonsense is just these AI companies creating in game currency, right?
Yeah it's often a hybrid of pay per use and monthly subscription.
The tokens often correspond to some kind of linguistic unit similar to but not quite a word. Copilot appearantly bills in credits not tokens so it's even more obscure.
Gotcha, okay. Yeah, the obscurity is the thing that was most immediate to me. Obfuscation of the costs is part of the business model I’m sure.
These costs are far less obfuscating. AI companies have been trying to hard to hide the true costs of computation for a long time, but the need to pay for what they're doing is catching up to them. They have been massively subsidizing all of their users by charging a flat fee and not making them pay for the actual computation costs.
Here's a great article about what's going on: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/
Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m gathering is happening. The adoption phase of the business model is long gone and they are now trying to recoup and keep the whole thing afloat in spite of the how unsustainable it is.
I bookmarked that article, Ed is one of the writers I’m always meaning to check out.
And they are perfectly capable at charging fractions of cents for cloud compute so that excuse doesn't cut it. Definitely ment to obfuscate pricing.
Tokens are supposed to be close to how much these LLMs cost to use per prompt, they would never intentionally undercut their growth so it must actually costs Microsoft close to $6000 to let them do this lol
Yeah I think this person is just using an absolutely insane amount of AI. Like they probably just run the AI 24/7. So now that its billing their for their actual usage its super high. lol
Literally the only reason I can imagine someone not using it at this point is sinophobia lol. It performs very well and even for the pro model, tokens are ridiculously cheap.
I don't use it because I don't want to use AI. Is that a correct approach? I don't know and I don't care
Entirely fair, should've specified "over other models."
They probably use the more expensive models.
Tokenmaxxed
Can't properly tokenmaxx without a net-positive tokamak
Could be that performance targets for M$ executives have changed and they suddenly no longer get their bonus based on AI adoption but on financial numbers again.
Right, I assume there is some correlation, but it still hits like funny money meant to obscure the real cost to the end user.
kind of... most of these systems, if you're not literally paying per token, you're still paying for a maximum number of tokens you can use, but they also often include 5 hour quota windows and 7 day quota windows. Then if you need 2x as much usage, it's always a jump to $200. At that extreme price jump (which probably gives you 5x quotas), you're better all paying for all the $20 plans from codex/claude/google than actually paying $200. also each model is different, so you can switch when one is down or quotas you or when one of them is just better at a task for no discernible reason (which is actually pretty common).
but to you're original point, it's like they combined the worst parts of subscript with the worst parts of buying in game currency.