The Meter Was Always Running

On the All-In podcast (episode #261), Jason Calacanis revealed his AI agents cost $300 a day. Each. At 10-20% capacity. Chamath Palihapitiya is now asking his team: "what's the token budget for our best devs?" These are sophisticated tech investors. They've been funding AI companies for years. And they're only now doing the math. That's not surprising. That's the whole problem. The Subsidized Illusion AI providers needed adoption. So they subsidized usage — consumer plans priced as loss leaders, enterprise tiers undercut to drive lock-in, free tiers generous enough to build habits. It worked. Developers integrated. Companies built pipelines. Engineering orgs restructured around the assumption that AI was cheap. Now the subsidies are ending. The gap between what individuals pay and what it actually costs to run these models is closing. And the companies that made irreversible hiring decisions based on subsidized pricing are finding out the meter runs whether or not the agent is doing an