Our AI Costs Jumped 230 Percent. I’m Not Setting Token Budgets

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One morning in early July, I woke to a flood of alerts from OpenAI and Ramp: You’re out of credits. Your card has been declined. I began to sweat. At 10 p.m. the night before, our credit balance was full, auto-reload was on, and our Ramp card had plenty of available funds. Somehow, less than 12 hours later, our account was zeroed out.

That squall turned out to be my brother, Every CEO Dan Shipper, testing Sol (ultra) on tasks designed for a senior engineer for that day’s Vibe Check of the model. By 10 a.m., we’d restocked the Ramp card with new funds, and I thought the storm had subsided. But our token spending stayed unusually high for the rest of the day, and we haven’t had a normal day since.

In the first five full days after GPT-5.6 Sol rolled out, our daily credit usage rose from 11,520 to 26,685 credits—almost 2.5 times our previous-week baseline. I had spent weeks bracing for Fable to blow up our budget, but Sol was the storm I didn’t see coming. Suddenly, I had to figure out how to enable daily work without bankrupting us. My colleagues’ reactions ran the gamut from “Let ‘er rip and let’s see where it lands at the end of the month!” to “We gotta impose limits now, and we should start exploring running our own models locally.” Meanwhile, we were burning through a month’s worth of token spend every few days.

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There was no easy solution. Experimentation is part of everyone’s job at Every; from engineering to business development, we all need to learn what these models can do and where they’re useful. Because valuable insights can come from anywhere in our company, everyone needs to be able to spend. Unlike many companies, we don’t go all-in on one model. People use whichever works best for the job, which makes our costs harder to predict as new models with different strengths and pricing structures come out. Any intricate allocation scheme I devised would be obsolete in days, if not hours.