Roughly 750,000 words of AI output costs $50 if you buy it from Anthropic’s Fable. The same volume from DeepSeek’s V4-Pro costs about 87 cents, Fortune reported. Z.AI’s GLM-5.2 charges $4.40. Moonshot’s Kimi K3, pricey by Chinese standards, charges $15.
Corporate America has noticed. Companies spent a year competing to burn tokens. Now they shop for the cheapest model that can finish the job, the Wall Street Journal reported. The badge of honour used to be tokenmaxxing. The new one is thrift-maxxing.
The first response to the bills was rationing, when firms capped what staff could spend. The second is substitution, and it is a far bigger problem for OpenAI and Anthropic.
“It’s like driving a Lamborghini to go to the grocery store to pick up milk when that was designed to be raced around a track,” said Mike Saeks, a field chief technology officer at Cursor who advises companies on their AI returns.
He has the receipts. Cursor priced up building a web browser from scratch. Running the whole job on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 cost a little over $10,000. Splitting it between Cursor’s own Composer model and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 cost $1,339.
