📈 Data to start your week: The cost of tokenmaxxing
Bye, bye fixed costs. Hello token anxiety.
Hi all, happy Monday.
This week’s Monday edition looks at one of the fastest-growing, least predictable costs in the AI stack: tokens.
Let’s go!
Vibe-coded for this edition: Play our token budget word quiz and win a prize.
The bill no one budgeted for
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga shared last month that his 5,000 engineers had depleted their entire 2026 token budget in just four months. So has ServiceNow.
Agentic adoption was bound to drive this kind of demand and the finance has to respond. CTOs are increasing their tech budgets this year – nearly 50% say their budgets are up by 10%. (As a side note, we believe that 10% is marginal given the token explosion we are experiencing.)
A token explosion is great news for engineering teams, but a real headache for CFOs who signed off on modest pilots months ago. 71% of companies exceeded their AI budgets in 2025 and over half of the surveyed finance bosses say cost management is their greatest concern.
Partially because AI costs can be highly variable and tricky to manage. The cost is not fixed as it was with good, old fixed-seat SaaS.
Is this the new normal?
Exponential token use is diffusion in action. In the US, the average monthly spend on AI by large enterprises grew 36% to $85,000 between 2024 and 2025.1
Labs in China told us that coding is where most labs are throwing their resources right now, their P0 in engineering terms.