Shyam Verma
By Shyam Verma —

200x More AI Power Per Dollar - The True Cost Revolution

200x More AI Power Per Dollar - The True Cost Revolution

Two invoices. Eight years apart. The difference will shock you.

AI Invoice 2017 vs 2025: 98% Price Drop

March 2017 - Building ReadyViews:
Google Cloud Invoice: $1,098.41

  • 1.2 million API calls for sentiment analysis
  • ~20 tokens per request = 24 million tokens equivalent
  • Monthly burn rate: $1,000+ just for AI

Google Cloud Invoice 2017

July 2025 - Building Linkstorm:
OpenAI Usage: $21.97

  • 96.121 million tokens processed
  • 225,284 API requests for the entire month

OpenAI Usage 2025

That's 200x cheaper per token - processing 4x more data for 50x less money.

What This Actually Means

In 2017, I was building ReadyViews - an AI tool that analyzed product reviews from Amazon, Flipkart, and other e-commerce sites. We had launched publicly and were solving real e-commerce problems. Every time someone searched for "best battery phones" or "gaming laptops under 40K," it cost me money.

The math was brutal:

  • Analyzing 100,000 reviews: $90
  • Adding a new product category: $900/month
  • Break-even point: Generate 1 million visits every month

Today with my Another AI Startup:

  • Analyzing 100,000 documents: $0.50
  • Processing millions of documents: $21.97
  • Break-even point: 1 customer at $29/month

The Proof Is in the Pricing

Look at how dramatically AI pricing has collapsed:

  • GPT-3 Davinci (Older): $0.06 per 1K tokens
  • GPT-3 Davinci (Sept 2021): $0.02 per 1K tokens
  • GPT-3.5 Turbo (2023): $0.002 per 1K tokens
  • GPT-4o mini (2025): $0.00015 per 1K tokens

That's a 99.75% price drop from the original GPT-3 pricing.

And it's not just OpenAI - Claude, Gemini, and others are all racing to the bottom on pricing while improving quality.

What You Can Build RIGHT NOW

For the same $1,098 I paid for one month in 2017, you can now:

  • Process 5 BILLION tokens with modern LLMs (vs 24 million in 2017)
  • That's 208x more tokens for the same price
  • Keep your AI startup running for 50 months (4+ years)

For $10/month in 2025, you can build:

  • A complete customer service bot handling 50,000 conversations
  • A document analysis tool processing 2 million pages
  • A content generation platform creating 1,000 articles daily

Why This Matters

I'm not sharing this to brag. I'm sharing this because most people don't realize the gold rush happening right now.

Every SaaS tool charging $299/month for "AI features" is using $5.00 worth of API calls.

Every "enterprise AI solution" at $5,000/month costs $20 to run.

The margin opportunity is insane.

The Window of Opportunity

The best time to build AI products is right now. Here's why:

  1. The pricing sweet spot - AI is cheap enough to experiment but still valuable enough to charge for
  2. Tools are mature - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google APIs are stable and well-documented
  3. Low barriers to entry - No PhD required. If you can write fetch() in JavaScript, you can build AI products
  4. Real problems to solve - Most businesses need help implementing AI effectively, not just access to it

Your Move

Stop reading about AI. Start building with it.

That $1,098 invoice from Google Cloud killed my startup in 2017.
That $21.97 OpenAI bill is now running a profitable business in 2025.

The invoices don't lie. The opportunity is real.

What are you waiting for?

Original ReadyViews story | Launch announcement | E-commerce solution | Startup Buzz feature | OpenAI historical pricing | Current OpenAI pricing

Shyam Verma, Founder at Ready Bytes (2009), ReadyViews (2015), and LinkStorm (2025)