I measured 681 AI sessions: where your money actually goes
You look at the bill and it makes no sense. You did not feel like you worked more than usual, you asked the same kinds of questions, and the counter doubled anyway. Nobody tells you where it went, so you assume you must be the one asking too much. It is not you. I measured 681 of my own sessions: nine requests out of ten cost almost nothing. What drains your subscription is the moments when the AI keeps hammering the same file. That is one request in seven, and it eats four tenths of everything it produces. What I did I kept a record of all my work with an AI for four months: 681 sessions, across 41 different projects, between 17 April and 10 August 2026. Every exchange leaves a trace of what it consumed. So I did not guess anything: I added it up. Fair warning: part of the result proved me wrong. Nine requests out of ten cost almost nothing That is the first finding, and it changes everything. When you ask your AI for something ordinary — add a page, fix this text, explain that to me — it barely registers on your subscription. You can do plenty of it. It is the remaining 10% of requests that eat more than half of everything. One bad request can cost as much as thirty good ones. So the question is not "am I talking to it too much". The question is: what happens in those moments? The moment that costs: when it keeps hammering I looked at what happens inside those requests. It is always the same scene. You ask it to fix something. It edits a file. It does not work. It edits the file again. Still nothing. It edits it again. And all of that without you saying a word in between. Here is the weight of it: What is happening Out of 100 requests Share of your subscription It touches the same file 3+ times 15 41% It touches the same file 5+ times 8 21% One request in seven eats four tenths of everything. And comparing a hammering request to a normal one: it produces six times more text to end up in the same place. In almost every case I re-read, the final result was already w