How to Squeeze AI Tools to Get the Most Out of Every Dollar

Use AI, yes, but be smart about it

Hey, Alberto here! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business. Paid subscribers get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:

This guide will teach you how to stop paying more for AI than you need to.

Imagine that every day you go to the supermarket and fill your cart to the brim. There’s no room for one more thing. The bill will be high, but the shopping trip has been a huge success: you got everything you needed. Now imagine that every day after going home from the grocery store, you throw half of the items you bought in the trash without even tasting them. Two cartons of milk? One in the trash. Ten apples? Five in the trash. Twenty pounds of ice cream? Well…

What kind of crazy person would do something like that? No one, I hope. And yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you use your favorite AI app. You think you’re using your money well, but the AI is wasting it without your consent or awareness. You pay $20 monthly for ChatGPT—or maybe $200—and throw half of it away, if not more. The reason this happens is that AI tools are not optimal when it comes to saving tokens—parts of words—the currency of AI tools.

Today I will explain how to fix this: How can you go shopping at the AI supermarket without wasting a penny—whether by buying at half the cost or making the most of your purchase? But first, let me explain what companies are doing and why it’s wrong.

The go-to strategy in the corporate world to stop the “token drain” is just as bad as the strategy that caused it in the first place. Before, they approached AI with a mindset known as tokenmaxxing—spend as many tokens as you can because more is better—and now that they’ve realized they’re throwing most in the trash, they’re cutting AI budgets so much that it’s hard to do anything interesting before hitting the limit.

Examples abound and are recent: Uber capped its engineers’ monthly budget at $1,500 after they burned through the entire 2026 budget in four months. Microsoft withdrew many Claude Code licenses in favor of an inferior in-house solution due to high prices—Satya Nadella said he used to engage in tokenmaxxing himself, that it was “addictive.” It is also unsustainable. A few days ago, Tesla made an even more drastic decision: $200 per week per engineer. And Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, keeps saying that the enterprise world is fed up and feels cheated: they keep buying tokens, yet the promised value doesn’t materialize.

Is total restraint better than total laissez-faire? Perhaps, but it’s still bad: first they failed by excess, and now by austerity. There has to be a better way. And there is. Actually, there are. I have collected 4 strategies that radically increase the ratio of value per dollar spent.

Behind the paywall:

1. How to know whether a cheaper alternative can handle your problem.

2. How to pick the model with the best cost-intelligence ratio for each task.

3. How to avoid micromanaging and overcorrecting the models.

4. How to separate output quantity from outcome quality.

I. A FIVE-SECOND CHECK