Lesson 1973 of 2116
Reasoning About Cost Per Task, Not Per Token
Compare model families on full-task cost including retries and context.
Lesson map
What this lesson covers
Learning path
The main moves in order
- 1The premise
- 2cost
- 3tokens
- 4unit-economics
Concept cluster
Terms to connect while reading
Section 1
The premise
Per-token price is misleading. The fair comparison is cost to complete one user task end-to-end, including context, retries, and tool calls.
What AI does well here
- Sum input plus output tokens per call.
- Aggregate spend by feature or user with tracing in place.
What AI cannot do
- Predict cost without running on representative traffic.
- Account for cost shifts when you change prompts.
Key terms in this lesson
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