#finops

Read token-compression claims through their denominators, paired tasks, cache costs and success criteria, with Tokenade versus RTK as a worked example.

A verified $214 bill for a production rewrite, checked against the source transcript, sits beside a corpus of about 2,900 tech talks on coding-agent costs.

Cloud FinOps put a cost study first and a named owner for the number second. Three practitioner cases show that sequence applied to token bills.

Twenty days of my own Claude Code and Codex usage, measured three ways. The tools disagree by a factor of three, and dollars are not what binds.

Opus 5.5 changes input, output and cache economics. Price the accepted task, including retries and review, before choosing a cheaper model.

Claims that nobody can measure AI ROI and that 95% of pilots return zero are weaker than their usual retellings, once their sources are checked.

What Back Market measured after 2 months on OpenRouter: a per-person budget, a provider shortlist, a longer liability chain. Full report to read online.

Compare RTK, Tokenade, Headroom and prompt caching by mechanism, integration and evidence. Smaller tool output does not establish a cheaper completed task.