That is simply not true, token price is largely determined by the token price of their rival services (even before their own operational costs). If everybody else charges about $1 per millions of tokens, then they will also charge about $1 per millions of tokens (or slightly above/below) regardless of how many answers per token they can provide.

This applies when there is a large number of competitors.

Now companies are fighting for the attention of a finite number of customers, so they keep their prices in line with those around them.

I remember when Google started with PPC - because few companies were using it, it cost a fraction of recent prices.

And the other issue to solve is future lack of electricity for land data centers. If everyone wants to use LLM… but data centers capacity is finite due to available power -> token prices can go up. But IMHO devs will find an innovative approach for tokens, less energy demanding… so token prices will probably stay low.

Opus 4.6 costs about 5-10x of GLM 5.

It only matters if the rivals have same performance. Opus pricing is 50x Deepseek, and like >100x of small models. It should match rival if the performance is same, and if they can produce model with 10x lower token usage, they can charge 10x.

Gemini increased the same Flash's price by something like 5x IIRC when it got better.

I bet that the actual "performance" of all the top-tier providers is so similar, that branding has bigger impact on if you think Claude or ChatGPT peforms better.

I don't know if "performance" is relevant in this context, where these "tools" are marketed to non-technical developers (read: "vibe coders") who are by definition unable to verify the quality of the code produced by their LLMs;

I think branding is the entire game.

My illiterate, LLM-addict cousin is convinced that Claude is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Criticisms of the code he (read: Claude) generates are not relevant to him -- Claude is the most intelligent being to ever exist, therefore, to critique its output is a naive waste of breath.

Performance or perception of performance

Potato potato Tomato tomato

What businesses charge for a product is completely unrelated to what it costs them.

They charge what the market will bear.

If "what the market will bear" is lower than the cost of production then they will stop offering it.

Companies make a loss on purpose all the time.

Not forever. If that's their main business then they will eventually have to profit or they die.