Token Debt Is the New Technical Debt
In almost twenty-five years in development I have watched the economics of software change: we paid for servers, then for compute, then for requests and data.
In 2020, after the GPT-3 API launched, we started paying per token, and the token became a unit of billing. In 2026 it took on a second role — a unit for measuring the complexity and productivity of AI systems. That is how software economics gained a new discipline: token economics, with its own definition, metrics, and research field.
Two facts show the scale. Weekly token consumption on OpenRouter grew almost 68-fold in fifteen months [1]. And a number of companies, according to a Goldman Sachs report (June 2026), already account for token cost in their financial plans and set token spending limits for employees [2]. The token has become a line item in the corporate budget.
Prices fell; the count grew faster
...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
