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Price per 1M tokens is meaningless

janilowski.pl

111–113 of 113 posts

Re: Price per 1M tokens is meaningless

#111

Price per token is meaningless for more reasons than this, because all of the provider monthly subscriptions price tokens _extremely_ differently than their per-token billing rates. It's stupid to look only at what you get when paying more than you need to for a given service.

Yes that's true, although calculating the exact discount you get using a subscription could be difficult, especially since the labs often don't state their actual limits and just tell you you get "more usage" or "even more usage" or "5x the usage" (but how much exactly is x?). It is clear we are getting a very meaningful discount by using a subscription though. I once checked how much would I pay for Codex after abou…

> calculating the exact discount you get using a subscription could be difficult

Why can't you derive this discount from experiments? Example of such research

https://she-llac.com/claude-limits

Re: Price per 1M tokens is meaningless

#113
the meaningless part is right but doesnt go far enough.. price per token also assumes every token does the same amount of work..

a model that reasons for 10x longer to get the same answer is not actually cheaper just because its rate is lower.

the number that actually tells you something is cost to get a task done end to end.. not the sticker price on a token. anyone tracking that instead of the headline rate ??

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