I have no idea how much I’ve spent, it’s invisible to me, the company doesn’t share it with me. I have no idea what “1 credit” means in terms of $$$, is that 1$? 0.1? 0.01? Is it even a fixed price? I have no idea how much will given take cost. Well, I can ask for a plan and extrapolate from that, but all perfectly reasonable looking plans eventually end up in a rabbit hole. Providers keep introducing new models and each is more expensive while offering modest improvements, it’s a silent inflation.

So I personally can easily believe that. Especially that a lot of people will just try to see if model can make that huge improvement / refactoring they’ve been hoping to do a reality, or tons of experiments to validate ideas.