@adlrocha - The Real Cost of Using AI in 2026

A few weeks ago I wrote about the shift from GPU-poor to token-poor. Since this post, and the ones I wrote about my recent obsession with AI independence, a lot of people have asked me for advice about how they should access intelligence: “fine, but what should I actually do? Buy a subscription? Pay per token? Build a rig? Rent one?” I dodged the economics in the token-poor post, so let’s do them properly now.The first thing I did before writing this post, is to pull my own token bill for the last 60 days (which have actually been slower than usual) in order to model my own token consumption (sidenote: BI built a really cool tool for this in nibble, my agent harness, that I can talk about in coming posts if someone is interested).91% of my token spend went to expensive models I cannot run at home (and that I never will because of their size and them being closed). But I already held a yearly subscription, so why not use those first? The open models I “could” (and let me add quotes…