THE TOKEN PRICE COLLAPSE AND WHY AI COSTS STILL INCREASE

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Cheaper tokens didn't shrink AI bills - they multiplied how many calls get made. Token prices fell more than 95% in three years, yet enterprise LLM spend more than doubled in 6 months to $8.4 billion. The volume surge lands directly on margin, since AI-native gross margins run 50-60% against 80-90% for traditional per-seat SaaS, and a flat seat price can't absorb a cost that scales with usage. That's forcing a shift toward per-action and per-outcome pricing, the model Salesforce, Intercom, and GitHub Copilot have already adopted.