𝗪𝗲'𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗞𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗸.

Building business plans, creative pipelines, team workflows and procurement strategies on a foundation made entirely of sticks. Cheap sticks. Subsidised sticks. Sticks that were never meant to hold the weight we put on them.

This week GitHub Copilot announced it's moving to usage-based billing. Anthropic's Opus multiplier jumping from 7.5x to 27x. It won't be the last. The platforms absorbed the inference cost long enough to make you dependent. Now, one by one, they're pulling their sticks out.

The marbles aren't abstract. They're your delivery pipeline. Your team's creative output. The workflow you built around a tool that may not exist at its current price in six months. The client promise you made assuming your stack costs stayed flat.

Here's the uncomfortable truth. Most teams haven't looked at their combined AI spend as a single number. They've signed up tool by tool, use case by use case, and the total crept up quietly while the individual subscriptions still felt reasonable. That calculus is about to change... across multiple platforms, simultaneously.

So before the sticks come out, do the audit nobody wants to do.

List every AI tool your team touches. Add the cost per seat. Now model it at somewhere between double and ten times your current cost. That isn't a worst case scenario: that's the honest risk range for the next 12 months.

Then ask a different question. Not what is best—but what will be industry standard in 6 to 12 months? The tool winning benchmarks today is not necessarily the one your clients, collaborators and procurement teams will expect you to be using next year.

Find one or two platforms that can do most of what you need. Prioritise commercial safety over feature sets: 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲, 𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗶𝗱𝘆? 

Prioritise ecosystem gravity: 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗮𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴? 

Prioritise procurement legibility: can a client approve it without a three-week legal review?

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹. 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝘁.

The sticks are coming out. 

This is no longer a game. 

The industry is maturing—and it's time we did too.

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