Token price rising
We are in the common movements of Price creation in technology.
First Telephone, horrendous price, until market will be flooded with cheaper alternatives from competitors.
Same as with TV
Same as with Fax
Same as with Mobilephone
Same as with PC/Laptop
Same as with Internet
Same as with smartphones
Same as with EV's
(And many more)
And now we are in the Ai-Token era, prices go up for the "better" quality.
But it wont hold forever, because once the AI is more optimized to have more token context on lesser hardware usage, we will see competitors (most likely open source models) rising up, and then the "alpha models" have to revamp their prices to not get drowned by the competitors.
I will say 2-4 months, until we have:
- Gemini 3.5-Flash-Lite, which is the same or a bit better than 3.1 just faster and cheaper.
- Haiku 4.6, which is the same as good as sonnet 4.6 just faster and cheaper
- GPT 5.5-mini which is the same as good like GPT 5.5 (low thinking) just faster and cheaper
- Grok 4.3-fast, which is the same as good like grok 4.2 just faster and cheaper.
And the Open source model goes for the run to be the same as good as top models on the market just cheaper.
Therefore... Yes it's super annoying what they doing now with the price and usage of the frontier models.
But we will always get cheaper alternatives soon. The competitors do not sleep.
I just hope that google will add 3.5-Flash-Lite to antigravity, to have back the user experience with 3-flash, just a little more better.
What do you guys think about?
And do you have alternatives with high usage and proper quality?