Why it matters
Bain's Jue Wang says client token costs have been doubling almost every other month. At $200 per developer per month across 20,000 developers, that becomes a line item no general manager ever planned for.
Tokenmaxxing read
Wang's diagnosis is a routing failure: teams reach for Opus even to draft routine email. Her fix is model routing, sending easy queries to cheaper systems and hard tasks to powerful ones. Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian calls it the new lines-of-code metric.
Source takeaway
The backlash has teeth: Satya Nadella warns customers pay twice, in tokens and in proprietary data, and Palantir's Alex Karp says enterprises are privately livid about tokens that return nothing. Cheap Chinese open models cut the other way.
