People love to flex by using the API costs for their subscription tokens.

I personally find it ridiculous. The cost is what you paid, not what someone else could have paid. Markets and all that.

It would be like using spot instances on AWS but flexing by boasting about how much on-demand $$ compute you used.

In this case, I think they are just giving you an idea of what it cost to do this. They aren't saying it's prescriptive