We price in credits. One credit is ten cents. Looks clean until you put two models side by side.
A 30 second 1080p clip is 90 credits on one video model and 513 on another. Same output spec, 5.7x the price. Credits were supposed to make cost legible and they do the opposite, because nobody carries a mental conversion rate. The number on the button is noise, so people find out what a generation costs after they have spent it.
I believe that cloud providers should make hard spending caps the default: when you hit your limit, everything stops, rather than you getting a warning email you only see after the damage.
The reason is simple: coding agents can now ship code that burns through paid APIs while you sleep.
