Anecdotally, ~$500-1500/month token spend at API OpenAI/Anthropic pricing seems pretty realistic for full-time engineers at companies with "liberal but not unlimited" LLM spend policies.

This is of course anecdata. I know plenty of outliers, too. I know a principal engineer who uses many multiples of the number I quoted above. I am sure we also know many people making do with much much smaller budgets as well, via all kinds of well-discussed methods.

But, "$500-$1500 per month per full-time developer" is just kind of the personal mental baseline I use when making my decisions with regards to thinking about whether any of this makes any economic sense.