If you want the reconciled invoice to carry the dimensions you bill back on, the provider has to let you attach them to the billed call. Three clouds, three different mechanisms, three different amounts of coverage, and one with no dollar figure at all.

The loud objection to enterprise AI spend is that the value does not justify the tokens. The quieter one is what the spend hands over: a view of your business that took years to build, and, more slowly, the problems that kept your people engaged. Trust is a scarce resource right now, and token-maxxing spends it like it is abundant.

The models are astonishing, the buildout is the largest in history, and the industry still has remarkably little proof of what durable, unsubsidized margins will look like. The fashionable diagnosis is “bubble”, but the situation is simpler and stranger: an industry that cannot say what its product costs, sells it in units nobody values, and is waiting — longer than it wants to admit — for the person who can finally find the price. Music once waited for the same person too. And he knew exactly what to charge once he came: 99 cents.