Eric Savoie

I found something on Product Hunt this morning that looked genuinely useful. Clean landing page, clear description, nice demo. I clicked the button to get started, and it asked me to create an account before showing a single dollar amount. No free tier mentioned, no starting price listed, nothing.
I closed the tab immediately. I am not handing over my email address just to find out if I can afford a product.
This happens all the time and I do not understand the logic behind it. If the pricing is reasonable, showing it upfront builds trust. If it is way too expensive, hiding it behind a signup wall just wastes everyone's time. Does this bother you as much as it bothers me, or do you create an account anyway?

Not a complaint about pricing. A real question I could not answer until I went looking.

The intuition is that a better model needs fewer attempts, so a job should get cheaper. My bill kept going the other way, and the price per token had gone down, not up.

The answer turned out to be in the docs. Reasoning models produce a block of internal work before they answer, and OpenAI's guide says it plainly: those tokens are "not visible via the API" but are "billed as output tokens". Anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of them. Anthropic bills the same way.