Any other AI builders thinking about token economics?

I'm an old school developer but have been building my first AI platform. Most of the development is familiar (i.e. basic systems architecture work hasn't changed much) but I’ve run into some counter-intuitive (for me) stuff…

• Too much instruction gives the model more ways to fail; too little leaves it without guidance for your use case, so it’s a careful ongoing curation process.

• There's a tension between what seems most helpful to the user and what is economically sustainable for the product.

• Every free user plays into your business model and conversion rate calculations, dictating how robust your freemium model can be.

I’m now seeing token management as a core part of UX. There’s an article about the tradeoffs on my profile if anyone wants to join me down this rabbit hole, but…

How are other builders thinking about this? Have you had to make tough choices about gating features or using multi-model architectures to make the numbers work?