#pricing history

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A rack-mounted run-time meter on an early server row with its hour dial caught mid-advance, a freshly printed instance-rate card pinned half-flat on the board beside it

From Origins to Frontier: A History of AI Inference Economics

AI inference pricing did not start with the token. It began as a rented hour, became a subscription tier, then a flat per-token rate, then split into caches, hidden reasoning charges and batch queues — traced through the dated announcements behind each layer.

By Brecht Corbeel · September 30, 2026 · 15 min read

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