this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
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.