Your AI Bill Is Rising Even Though Prices Dropped
Something strange is happening to the cost of building with AI. Every headline says prices are collapsing — and they are. Per-token rates have fallen roughly 97% since 2023, and open-weight models now cost a fraction of the frontier ones. And yet, quietly, the bill keeps going up. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI-coding budget by April. Microsoft revoked developers’ Claude Code licenses months after enabling them. Priceline’s contract renewal came back 4–5× more expensive. One engineer reportedly ran up a $40,000 token bill in a single month. Per-developer token consumption rose roughly 18.6× in nine months as tools drifted from “answer a question” to “agent, do the task.” ...