My rant on token-based pricing is primarily based on the difficulty in consistently forecasting spend.....and also that the ongoing value of a token is controlled by the vendor...."the house always wins"

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

There are enough vendors that it's difficult for any one vendor to charge too much per token. There are also a lot of really good open-weight models that your business could self-host if the hosted vendors all conspire to charge too much per token. (I believe it's only economical to self-host big models if you're using a lot of tokens, so there is a breakeven point.)