“We believe in total financial transparency,” said VP of Engineering Davina Patel, shouting over the furious clicking noise of the meter. “When three different users ask ‘what is the wifi password,’ ‘give me the wifi password,’ and ‘wifi pass pls,’ our AI treats these as three totally unique, expensive adventures. This ensures our bill grows 30% every month, which proves our employees are very curious.”

“The meter really helps us appreciate the value of a simple sentence,” explained Director of Employee Success Kyle Broflovski. “I just watched an intern spend $4.50 in compute credits asking the bot to write a ‘polite but firm’ slack message to his roommate. The meter started smoking, but the message was very clear.”

At press time, the CFO began installing coin slots on all company laptops, requiring four quarters before the Enter key will work.

Inspired by the real story: Companies are seeing massive AI bills because identical questions asked in slightly different ways trigger full costs every time. Read the full story.