I think we could eventually get to a point where $1000/m+ consumption would be considered a bargain.
I currently pay ~$150/m in tokens to cover my 1099 work. If I had to pay $1000 for those same tokens each month, I would still be massively positive on my margins. I bill customers based upon # of completed features & bugs, not total time spent at the computer. Tokens would have to more than 10x in cost before I would start to have a problem on my end.
The fee schedule is simple: Every work item is assigned a difficulty level by the business + in-house dev team. That is multiplied by a base fee and that establishes the bounty for the item. I get paid this amount the moment the work item flows into production and is approved by customer.
There are no limits. If they were to hand me 120 days worth of work and I finish it in one week, I would get paid exactly the same. I don't have to be clandestine about this either. The contract clearly describes this arrangement, so there are some cases where it's like "wow I can't believe we're gonna pay $10000 for that amount of labor", but we all know that isn't the point. They know they got exactly what they bargained for. It's just ahead of schedule, which provides even more intrinsic value to the business.
In this arrangement, if I were to bill the client for my token usage, a small conflict in interest could arise. It's not a big deal, but most things start out that way.
I currently pay ~$150/m in tokens to cover my 1099 work. If I had to pay $1000 for those same tokens each month, I would still be massively positive on my margins. I bill customers based upon # of completed features & bugs, not total time spent at the computer. Tokens would have to more than 10x in cost before I would start to have a problem on my end.