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Having contracted in a company that tipped over from subscription token pricing to API token pricing recently, there’s still extremely good reason to keep your software a transparent.

The bill for the API usage was _hundreds_ of times higher than the subscriptions. Companies with a few hundred engineers, but without sky-high margins, simply cannot afford not to understand their codebases.

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Yep, fully leaning onto those subsidized subscriptions and closed models is dangerous. At the very least keep it at a level where you can fallback to some cheaper, preferably open model which has predictable pricing you can actually afford.

this is kind of blowing my mind, have engineers here peeked at a bill for a medium to large size orgs token usage? growing all the time and yet everyone's solution to the inevitable issues that come from letting go of the wheel is to have Fable 12 come and rescue you. have fun tying your destiny to unpredictable recurring costs, or we could just be engineers and understand the things we build.

Agreed! And unpredictable recurring costs that could easily end up being controlled by monopoly/oligopoly players who have investors with expectations that run from aggressive to hallucinatory.

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