Price is not a good meter. Active parameters per token are. Joule would be even better.

It's an excellent metric, the amount of applications not viable now due to cost/latency/throughput is vastly bigger than the amount of current use cases. Even current ones do benefit, e.g. it's a great executor subagent.

Energy and intelligence are good too, sure.

Price accounts for computational/architectural efficiency improvements whereas active parameters does not.

for someone with a limited budget it is actually very important because it makes me less scared to experiment.