The real prices of frontier models. Tokens * Price, right?

# Summary The article reveals that AI model pricing is misleading because it only advertises cost per token while hiding the critical variable: different models' tokenizers convert the same text into different numbers of tokens. For TypeScript code specifically, Claude's newest tokenizer creates 73% more tokens than GPT-5.x for identical files, making direct price comparisons between models fundamentally unreliable and potentially far more expensive than advertised rates suggest.