Two court musicians in Florence, three coppers left in the till. The Duke walks in wanting something new — solemn but lively, fresh but familiar — with no budget, and one more thing: put his name in the music. Not on the title page. In it. Where people can hear it.
Priced 42 days of my own AI usage at list rates: 2.4B tokens, $1,939. Everything I typed: $0.29. 90% of the bill is carrying context in and out. The lever is context, not model choice. A flat subscription buys cost invisibility, not cost control.
Set up new-api, China's most popular LLM gateway (48k stars), in my lab. In the 13 days before I installed it, it shipped 10 release candidates; two would not start after upgrade. No stable tag. So I pinned the image by digest. Not paranoia.
Read a pile of posts by small Chinese companies on LLM gateways. Their pain, in order: no idea which team spent the money; keys scattered in code, one ban stops all; model outages. Compliance barely appears. Vendor decks put it first.
People ask if they can share a Claude subscription. Tools exist that turn a $200/mo Max plan into an API and resell it for $1,000+. That gap is why every "relay station" exists, and why they get banned. A subscription is a discount for heavy users, not a wholesale price.
Demanding labels on AI-generated text assumes human writing stays more competitive. That assumption has a shelf life. The rule will outlive it.