Cheaper tokens, bigger bills
What most people think
AI gets cheaper every year, so a company's AI bill in 2026 should be smaller than its bill in 2025.
What the data shows
4months
Uber set aside a whole year of AI money for 2026 and ran through all of it by April, then capped every engineer's spending.
Cheaper per unit, many more units per job. That hisaab only goes one way.
Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and capped each engineer.
In plain terms Two panels: on the left what most people assume, on the right what the numbers show, with the one figure that settles it.Source · Bloomberg (Natalie Lung) via Simon Willison's Weblog · 3 June 2026
Only one of these is your bill
Look at your electricity bill. There is a rate per unit, and there are units used.
- token
- A piece of a word. It is the unit AI companies price their work by.
- per-token price
- What one of those pieces costs. In 2023 the cheap models started at $0.25 per million, and capability that cost dollars then now costs cents.
- cost per task
- The price of one piece times how many pieces the job used. On your electricity bill, this is the bottom line.
Source · Simon Willison's Weblog · 4 June 2026
One job, over a million tokens
So how many of those pieces does one job use? A chat reply is a few thousand of them. One measured coding job used over a million.
How to read this — Each step up the side is ten times the step below it, so a small-looking gap on this chart is a large one. Read the height of each dot. Press Linear for the evenly spaced view.
How to read this — Each step up the side is ten times the step below it, so a small-looking gap on this chart is a large one. Read the height of each dot. Press Linear for the evenly spaced view.
Log y-axis · equal steps are equal multiples. Top value is 273× the bottom.
One measured coding task used 1,363,250 tokens. A chat reply uses a few thousand.
In plain terms Each dot is one kind of task, placed by the number of tokens it used.Source · Simon Willison's Weblog, llm-pricing. Lower point illustrative, not measured · 4 June 2026
The software changed jobs
In November 2025 the software stopped answering questions and started doing whole jobs. A job is a loop.
In November 2025, two coding models shipped a week apart. Coding agents went from often working to mostly working.
The agent reads your code, tries a change, runs the tests, reads the failure, and tries again.
The developer Simon Willison, who tracks AI pricing, writes that agents "maintain state by replaying entire conversations with each new prompt".
Source · Simon Willison's Weblog · 19 and 27 May 2026
Most of it was re-reading
So the loop re-sends everything it already has, on every step. Here is one real coding task, split three ways. Cached means the pieces the agent had already sent once.
One measured task used 1,363,250 tokens. Of those, 1,176,320 were cached and 17,112 were new code.
In plain terms Each bar is one slice of a single task's token bill, longest first.Source · Simon Willison's Weblog, llm-pricing · 4 June 2026
Billing changed, prices rose, budget gone
Almost all of that task was context the agent re-sent. Now watch what the billing did next. Frontier means the newest and most capable model on sale.
In plain terms The key events in order down a rail, with coloured dots flagging the pivotal moments.Source · Simon Willison's Weblog · 19 May to 3 June 2026
One engineer, one tool, one month
So the cap arrived on 2 June. It covers only the tools that write and run code on their own.
Per engineer, per tool
$1,500/month
A median Uber US engineer's total pay is around $330,000 (about ₹3.1 crore), an outside estimate, not a company figure.
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About ₹1.4 lakh a month, for one person and one tool.
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A year of that cap, on two tools, is roughly $36,000. Assuming an engineer uses two tools.
The cap covers agent tools like Cursor and Claude Code, not chat assistants.
In plain terms One number, large, and beside it the everyday things it equals, so the size can be felt rather than read.Source · Bloomberg (Natalie Lung) via Simon Willison's Weblog. Levels.fyi for the pay estimate. Converted at about ₹95 to the dollar, September 2026 · 3 June 2026
Where else the money moved
So one engineer with two tools can spend $36,000 a year. Here are four more readings, taken off other meters.
The token bill, four readings
In plain terms The headline numbers from the story, each with its unit and a one-line note.Source · Simon Willison's Weblog. Levels.fyi for the pay estimate · 20 April to 3 June 2026
The work changed shape
Those four numbers point the same way. One price rose in April, at the top of the market. Where the price per piece held still, the bill rose, because the work changed shape, and a business pays for work. Think of it like your electricity bill again. The rate per unit fell, which means very little when one job went from a few thousand units to over a million. Writing new code is close to free now. Getting good code is still expensive, and that is what the meter counts.
Source · Simon Willison's Weblog