The pricing shift from per-seat subscriptions to per-token consumption is not a cost-fairness story. It is a behavioral design choice. Token billing decouples the cost of using a feature from the moment of deciding to use it. Every prompt is a tiny purchase the user does not feel. The bill arrives a month later, in aggregate, with no usable signal about which interaction was worth it.
The twist in B2B is what makes this lethal. The user pulling the lever is not the one paying. They never were. Nobody at your company ever cared what their Slack seat cost, or their Jira seat, or any other seat. The seat had a price, the price was bounded, and that was the end of it. Token pricing removes the bound. The same indifference now meets a meter that can run anywhere.
We have three users in our org consuming a multiple of what an average user does. Each one is racking up thousands of euros in tokens a month. As a per-seat price, that number would have been unimaginable. Nobody would have signed off on a 5K Slack license. As a usage line, it slipped through, because no single prompt looked expensive and no review process is built to catch it.
The slot machine analogy missed one thing. In a real casino, the gambler is the one whose bank account empties. In B2B token pricing, the gambler and the bank are different people, and the gambler has no incentive to stop. The vendor knows this. The price is set against that knowledge.
Thoughts? Find me on Bluesky.