I wonder if we could find a way to donate unused tokens or even local compute resources to open-source projects we support. Especially for security auditing where it could probably be somewhat more asynchronous and disconnected than the open-source developers' personal tool choices.

"unused tokens" are the force driving token cost down. If everyone used all of the tokens they thought they were paying for, prices would explode. People with subscriptions that don't get out everything they can are subsidizing the system.

There are ways to use LLM service providers that leave no tokens unused, by just billing per token. Unsurprisingly, this quickly becomes much more expensive than subscriptions.

“Unused tokens” are a weird, fragile concept that I wouldn’t want to build upon. You can just donate money, you know. That’s what money’s for - it’s the universal exchange thingy.