The rate card is not the bill.
2.1 Reasoning tokens are invisible cost. o3 lists at $2/$8 per million tokens — an 80% cut from its own launch price. But high reasoning effort adds 10,000–30,000 “thinking” tokens to a single response, billed at the output rate. Your cost per query can climb while the rate card falls.1
2.2 Falling prices have not produced falling bills. GPT-4's $30/$60 became GPT-4o's $2.50/$10 in a year. Enterprise AI spend still rose 108% year over year. Usage grows faster than unit price falls — which is why your bill is not forecastable from a rate card.1,3
2.3 You hold no price protection. No lock, no cap, no notice period. Models are deprecated and traffic rerouted at the vendor's discretion.
Unit price down. Total spend up.
Precedent · Broadcom / VMware
In December 2023, Broadcom acquired VMware for ~$61B. It then cut roughly 168 product bundles to four, ended perpetual licensing, and raised the minimum purchase from 16 cores to 72. Customers reported increases of 8–15x. Perpetual-to-subscription conversions exceeded 1,000%; AT&T was reportedly quoted 1,050%. Gartner called it a once-in-a-decade disruption to enterprise IT budgets.2
Nothing in your AI contracts prevents this.
1 OpenAI published API list prices, input / output per 1M tokens. o3 reduced from $10/$40 to $2/$8, June 2025.
2 Broadcom / VMware: customer and press reports; Gartner commentary.
3 Zylo, 2026 SaaS Management Index: year-over-year enterprise AI spend growth.