From experience, if you work somewhere with very disconnected higher ups a sales person shows what your token usage is vs spend on the monthly subs for whatever set of users you have and then show an API price with a sample bill for even “more users” at that same number of tokens that is 30% lower. The crux of course being that your existing user base is not going to use fewer toke a just because you signed more people up and have a discount for the status quo.

Then when you consolidate all users to a single provider you find out you have a 2x to 3x larger bill because you… logically have more users at the same average token spend than the quote.

At my previous job, all while managing a full team, I did a lot of porting of legacy apps to modern standards to maintain various obligations. It was AI gen work in between meetings and paperwork. It was seen as such a success that I was asked to move to an IC role to focus on it within the “Elite new products team” that was supposed to be all AI and the latest tech. I showed up to find that they were pushing out low quality manually written code in 12 hour days six days per week to appear like LLMs were in use to save face because they lacked a token budget or the skills to properly manage one under the APIs. They had dismissed someone who had spent multiple thousands per month on Agent swarms. It was the perfect situation to make their 3x budget issue a 10-30x budget spend issue.

For many many reasons I left that job and got a new one but that was the cherry on top.

I see you are not familiar with enterprise IT hardware and software purchasing...

Companies still believe they have IP to protect. Even when all they do are basic CRUD systems or on the verge of collapsing if they don’t renew some contracts.

What was the alternative? It takes time for the open weight ecosystem to develop.