Yes, this is an important point although it has changed with A.I. Software is traditionally very high margin and so a $10k bill can be written off by the provider without any meaningful loss.

As a customer, the big number is scary and causes panic but for the provider… customers constantly fail to pay bills, providers are constantly writing off bills because it just isn’t worth the cost to chase, if a customer says “hey that usage was a mistake” it’s usually worth it to write it off to save the relationship. If you write off a big bill that wouldn’t have been paid anyway, the customer will perceive you as wonderful and benevolent and be loyal for life when they are ready to spend their money.

With tokens though the actual cost being incurred is much, much higher. If your service is just a wrapper around tokens, and a customer incurs $10k of usage that you paid OpenAI $5k for, it becomes much more difficult to write off.

Google Cloud is one of the few services that actually pursues unpaid bills even on their high margin services.

Google Cloud is also the scariest because of how much damage it can do and how bad their payment system can be.

I recently loaded up on prepaid api credits for gemini and it somehow triggered some billing shenanigans in my linked accounts where it said I had a negative balance (from the credits), and they were going to discontinue my services. I had to reset some settings to sort it out, mainly using their chat ai and mine (because theirs gave me right status info, but wrong conclusions).

It's pretty messy across like aistudio.google.com, and their typical console, and google workspace business account. I'd be so fucked if they froze my account, I'd rather just pay openrouter to access credits in the future.