Parallax · tech desk · — 18
AI keeps getting cheaper per token, and that is exactly why the bill goes up. The price per unit fell, the units per task exploded, and Uber burned its whole 2026 AI budget in four months.
Everyone agrees on the sentence: AI is getting cheaper. Look closer and it is true at the unit level and false at the invoice level, and that gap is the whole story. A scissor has two blades. Watch both.
THE SCISSOR
Around November 2025, coding agents crossed from often-work to mostly-work and became daily drivers for highly paid engineers. The shift from a tool you talk to into a worker that runs for you is what changed the token math, because an agent that works autonomously burns vastly more tokens than a chat that answers a question.
THE CROSSOVER
The other blade, plotted. One of Willison's GPT-5 Codex tasks consumed 169,818 input, 17,112 output, and 1,176,320 cached tokens: well over a million for a single task, and the only verified point on this chart, sitting at the top. The vertical axis is logarithmic because that anchor sits three orders of magnitude above the bottom. The lower points trace the shape from a single chat turn upward and are illustrative of task class, not measured.
How to read this — The five points climb in an even line because each step up this axis is a multiplication rather than an addition. Press Linear for the proportional view, where the lower four crowd into the bottom fifth while the measured task stands far above them; both plot the same five numbers.
Log y-axis · equal steps are equal multiples. Top value is 273× the bottom.
TOKENS PER TASK
Read top to bottom, the sequence explains itself. The tools got good, so the pricing flipped to metered usage; once usage was metered, the frontier price started rising; and an enterprise budget set against the old mental model ran out a third of the way into the year.
HOW THE BILL CAME DUE
The rate card is one number; the realised cost is another. Over thirty days, at standard interface rates, Willison ran up more than two thousand dollars of tokens. He paid two hundred. That gap is what keeps the true cost off the individual's own statement, which is precisely why finance is the last to find out. The dashed line marks what he actually paid.
THE REAL PRICE OF A SESSION
Uber is the first named company to run into the scissor in public. The cap is a ceiling, drawn around a line item that, left uncapped, ate a year's budget by April. The figures, set side by side.
$1,500 / MONTH
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