TokenDeck — scenario planner for AI inference cost and pricing
A scenario-planning tool for finance and strategy teams at companies spending six-figures on AI, letting you model how a 50% price cut, a prompt doubling, or a switch from frontier to open-source models changes your bill, your gross margin, and your pricing tiers.
Corporate strategy and finance leads tracking AI vendor spend or building AI features into a product
- Drag-token-cost simulator that recalculates monthly spend, gross margin, and unit economics against current vendor prices
- Side-by-side frontier vs open-source vs self-hosted cost paths for the same workload
- Saved scenarios for 'what if Anthropic/OpenAI cut prices 50%' or 'what if average prompt length doubles this quarter'
- Exportable pricing-tier recommendations and CFO-ready one-pagers per scenario
Benedict Evans's essay captures the exact moment corporates are scrambling to forecast 2026 AI spend under unstable vendor pricing — and nobody owns the modeling layer yet.
Multiple convergent signals: 73% of enterprises blow AI budgets, Deloitte published a CFO token-economics guide, '2026 AI spending reckoning' is a documented trend, and dedicated AI-cost-forecasting consultancies (ICS Universe, ComputeForecast) are emerging.AI Token Economics 2026: Enterprise AI Pricing and Budget Management ↗AI token economics for CFOs | Deloitte US ↗The 2026 AI Spending Reckoning: Why the Bills Came Due ↗
Direct scenario-planning-for-finance niche is open, but adjacent competitors exist: Helicone/Portkey/Langfuse cover observability + cost tracking, CloudZero/Flexera do AI FinOps, and Helicone already ships a pricing calculator. The specific 'model a 50% price cut on gross margin' angle isn't owned yet.LLM API Pricing Calculator | Compare 300+ AI Model Costs ↗AI Cost Management & FinOps Platform | Reduce AI Spend ↗Langfuse vs Helicone vs Portkey: LLM Observability Compared ↗
Helicone Team tier is $799/mo and Pro is $79/mo proving willingness to pay for AI cost tooling; target buyers (finance/strategy at six-figure AI spend) have explicit budget; Deloitte publishing CFO guides confirms executive-level appetite.Helicone Pricing ↗Helicone Pricing | UsagePricing ↗
AI cost discipline is becoming permanent given budget-overrun rates and multi-year vendor pricing volatility, but risk that hyperscalers (OpenAI, Anthropic) or FinOps incumbents (CloudZero) absorb scenario-modeling as a feature, and token prices may stabilize reducing modeling demand.Forecasting Enterprise AI Costs — Methods That Hold Up ↗AI Token Cost Forecast 2026-2030 - Market Research ↗
Publicly available per-token pricing from all major vendors, open-source LLM cost calculators already exist, Helicone proves the proxy/observability stack is buildable, and the core deliverable is essentially a spreadsheet with a UI on top of pricing APIs.LLM API Pricing Calculator | Compare 300+ AI Model Costs ↗