Comment by Incipient
12 hours ago
>it’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price!
I think this is really telling. The cost of AI has really been masked HUGELY to drive adoption. The true cost is likely to be unsustainable for the big complex tasks (agents running for hours+) that companies have been pushing.
I was skeptical, then quietly bullish on AI, but I'm now seeing signs the market is cracking and the availability is going to receded/costs balloon.
Copilot is pretty unique in that they were only measuring requests, and that model is just broken for agentic systems.
CC wasn't per-token either? Nor is Codex?
From my simple checks - and from Microsoft's own blog - per token pricing isn't going to be realistic for agentic coding either.
Claude Code is definitely token based, its been discussed extensively on Hacker News and the related Github threads. A large context cache miss can take half your usage easily in just one request... "max" just means more reasoning tokens. I've also run out of usage during a single request in CoWork. Its definitely token based.
They don't show your usage in tokens for Claude Code and Codex subscriptions, but that is how they are doing the accounting.