Topic · 5 stories
What AI really costs: token and API pricing, usage-based SaaS plans, FinOps for AI workloads, build-vs-buy decisions and the ROI of AI features.
DeepSeek’s Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 calls against $10 on Claude and OpenAI. For most agents the call fee is the smaller half of the bill: the result tokens are the rest. How to price both and cap them.
Mistral Large 4 lists at $1.36 in and $4.18 out per million tokens, far below Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra. Here’s why the launch price, cached input and cost per finished task shrink that gap, and how to measure it on your own traffic.
Small models now cost a fortieth of the top tier, so routing easy requests to them is worth doing. How a cascade decides what escalates, where its hidden costs are (cold caches, long-prompt pricing, wrong answers that pass), and when one model is simpler.
AI features have a real cost per request, and it lands on your gross margin. How to log inference cost per customer and feature, where margin leaks (heavy users, free-tier abuse, model upgrades) and which levers move it.
From December 3, 2026, Atlassian bills automation steps beyond your included allowance, alongside Rovo credits. How steps are counted, how to forecast a typical, busy and worst month, and why running out and Rovo actions in rules matter more than the step price.
