AI’S PRICE PER TOKEN DOESN’T TELL US WHAT WE REALLY SPEND
AI charges by the token, a small piece of text, but the price per token doesn’t tell us what we really spend. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra costs 2.5 times more per token than Claude Opus 5.5. Yet Opus 5.5 writes about 119,000 tokens per task, and 84,000 of those go to reasoning. Astra writes far fewer, so it ends up costing less.
So a model can cost less per token and still cost more for every finished job. Test any model on your own real work first. Then divide the total cost, including the hours spent reviewing the output, by the number of answers that passed the check.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #AICosts #Tokens #Business