Anthropic is renting Elon's GPUs for inference. The token shortage just started.

Elon won. He's the only one with capacity to sell tokens at scale, right when the token shortage officially started. Fun detail buried in the news: Anthropic is already renting Colossus 1 from xAI for inference. Their competitor literally runs on Musk's iron. The volume is exploding. Google: 9.7T → 3.2 quadrillion tokens/month (May 2024 → May 2026). Azure Foundry: up 7x YoY, north of 500T tokens through Foundry APIs. Token consumption is growing two orders of magnitude faster than prices are falling. **The subsidies are over.** OpenAI's leaked internals project a $14B loss in 2026 on $13B revenue. They burn $1.69 for every $1 they earn, and the entire delta is inference. Anthropic's gross margin sits at \~40%, OpenAI's at \~33%. Both are below SaaS-standard 70-80%. Cursor killed unlimited (June 2025). Claude Code capped Pro and Max (August 2025). GitHub Copilot flipped fully usage-based (June 2026). The pattern repeats because the math forces it. As OpenAI and Anthropic file for IPO, they will close this gap by raising API prices. Their margin is your cost now. **As a founder shipping AI products, how do you survive?** 1. Full cost visibility. You need cost per customer, per agent, per workflow, in real time, not at month-end. If you find out which customer is unprofitable when the AWS bill lands, you're already underwater. This is exactly what we built Credyt for: real-time metering on top of LLM API spend, with per-customer, per-agent, per-workflow attribution. Without that layer, the next three rules are guesses. 2. Cost-to-value math, per segment. Your margin lives in the gap between what a customer's usage costs you and what they pull out of it. If a segment isn't getting enough value, switch them to a cheaper model or self-hosted. If they're getting a lot, raise prices. Most founders skip the segmentation step and price one number for everyone, which is how power users eat the margin. 3. Prove the value out loud. Your customers won't accept a price increase unless they can see what they're getting. Numbers, stories, before/after. Show the workflow saved 14 hours of analyst time, the support deflection saved $X, the conversion lift moved $Y. Value lives in your customer's words and metrics, not yours. Token costs are going up. Costs will land on builders. The founders who survive this will be the ones who can answer "what does this customer cost me right now" without opening a spreadsheet.