Why I switched from per-token AI billing to flat-rate: a developer's honest breakdown

Why I switched from per-token AI billing to flat-rate: a developer's honest breakdown I've been building AI-powered tools for two years. In that time, I've burned through three different billing models — pay-per-token, monthly subscription with limits, and now flat-rate unlimited. Here's what actually happened to my costs and my stress levels with each. The per-token era (expensive and unpredictable) My first AI integration was direct Anthropic API calls. I was building a document summarizer for