LLM Pricing Has Never Made Sense — Practitioner Analysis of Token Economics
anderegg.ca / Hacker News·medium signal
A practitioner analysis argues that LLM pricing models are fundamentally broken, examining the disconnect between per-token costs and actual value delivered. With DeepSeek V4 at $0.14/M input and GPT-5.5 at $5/M input — a 35x spread for models that compete on benchmarks — the essay resonates with builders questioning what they're actually paying for. 27 points but 22 comments on HN, indicating high discussion quality relative to upvotes.