Why Your AI Bill Is Harder to Predict Than Your Hosting Bill
Two bills, two different shapes A hosting bill is capacity. You add CPU, bandwidth or storage, and the meter follows the traffic curve. Once you have seen a month, you can predict the next one within a few percent. A token bill is behaviour. Two teams with identical traffic can differ by 20× because one sends 12,000 tokens of retrieved context per request and the other caches a 400-token system prompt and sends nothing else. Same users, same features, wildly different invoices. ...