AI Was Supposed to Lift Everybody., The Price Tag Says Otherwise
Two weeks ago, we ran an AI agent for two hours. The kind of thing a small business does when it's setting up operations — researching, drafting, configuring, iterating. The kind of thing AI is supposed to make easier and more accessible for everyone.
- ▪Two weeks ago, we ran an AI agent for two hours.
- ▪The kind of thing a small business does when it's setting up operations — researching, drafting, configuring, iterating.
- ▪The kind of thing AI is supposed to make easier and more accessible for everyone.
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Two weeks ago, we ran an AI agent for two hours. Not a demo. Not a toy project. Real work. The kind of thing a small business does when it's setting up operations — researching, drafting, configuring, iterating. The kind of thing AI is supposed to make easier and more accessible for everyone. The bill was $300. That was GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's current flagship model. Two hours. Three hundred dollars. Multiply that across a week of real business use, and you're looking at thousands. Here's the part that should make you uncomfortable: we ran the same kind of work on models built outside the United States — and the cost was in the single digits. Same quality tier. Same capability level. Roughly one-thirtieth the price. This isn't a technical post about token optimization or prompt engineering.
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