How Much Should You Be Spending on Tokens Per Employee? | Tech Stackups

Skip to main content<br>There is no agreed answer to "how much should a developer spend on AI tokens per month," but in mid-2026 a lot of people started saying their number out loud. The range is absurd: it runs from companies that have banned AI coding tools entirely (and report productivity went up) to a single OpenAI employee burning $1.3 million of tokens in a month.

Below is a roundup of every credible data point I could find, sorted from lowest to highest, normalised to USD per person per month wherever the source allows. A few caveats first: most individual "spend" figures are heavily subsidised by flat-rate subscription plans, so the raw token value consumed is usually far higher than the cash that changed hands. Where a source gives a daily figure I've assumed ~21 working days to get a monthly number. Treat everything as order-of-magnitude, not accounting.

The spectrum, low to high​

$0/month — Companies that banned AI coding tools​

Anonymous VP of Engineering (via Devrim Ozcay) — banned GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Claude Code company-wide in October 2025 over security/IP concerns. Six months later he reports productivity up 20% , fewer production bugs, and real code review returning. Spend on tokens: zero. (Level Up Coding)

Culture Amp (Doug English, CTO) — not a full ban, but hard guardrails: AI coding is kept out of complex brownfield work where technical debt risk outweighs the speed-up. (MIT Sloan Management Review)

This is the genuine "AI is bad, we buy no tokens" floor of the distribution. The thesis: the benefits (faster shipping) are immediate and visible; the costs (comprehension gaps, maintenance, knowledge silos) are slow and hidden.

~$0/month marginal — Run the model locally (antirez / DwarfStar DS4)​

Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) built DwarfStar 4 (DS4), a local inference engine that runs DeepSeek V4 on a single 96–128GB Mac using asymmetric 2-bit/8-bit quantization. Per-token API cost: effectively nothing beyond electricity .

His framing is the whole point: "AI is too critical to be just a provided service." If you can run a near-frontier model on hardware you already own, your "token budget" collapses to a one-time hardware cost. (antirez.com)

Slower than Claude, but HN testers repeatedly noted it feels surprisingly close — the local-inference escape hatch from token bills is now real.

~$100–200/month out of pocket — Simon Willison (individual power user)​

Willison pays roughly $100 per provider to Anthropic and OpenAI on their subsidised individual plans — call it $100–200/month in actual cash.

The catch: his real token consumption is about $1,000/month against each provider (~$2,000/month of value) — and he once calculated that $200 of subscriptions had consumed $2,180.16 of tokens at API rates. The labs are eating the difference. (Simon Willison, Threads)

He calls Uber's $1,500/tool cap "rational" and notes those subsidised individual plans are not available to large companies — which is why corporate numbers are so much higher.

Low hundreds/month per dev — Typical mid-size enterprise​

Anonymous 500-developer company — AI tooling invoice of $87,000/quarter (~$340k/year projected), i.e. roughly $57/developer/month , with 85% daily adoption. The CFO now wants ROI nobody can cleanly prove. (Reddit r/EngineeringManagers)

This is where most "normal" companies actually sit — until agentic workflows kick in and the number jumps an order of magnitude.

Mandate-driven (no public per-head $) — Sentry / David Cramer​

Sentry co-founder David Cramer sent an internal memo making AI usage effectively mandatory — "it is quickly becoming a required skill" — and built dashboards to measure adoption. No clean per-employee dollar figure is public, but the direction of travel is "use it or fall behind." (LinkedIn)

~$2,000–4,000/month per employee — Hudson River Trading (Iain Dunning)​

On the Odd Lots live show, HRT's head of AI Iain Dunning gave the most candid real numbers anyone has: average token spend is "on the order of $100–200 a day, per employee" on his team — roughly $2,000–4,000/month. (YouTube / Odd Lots)

Heavy users run "$1,000 a day range, bursty" (~$20,000/month in surges).

His "token-rich vs token-poor" framing is the key quote of the whole topic: "I just don't understand how people who are token poor could keep up with someone who's token rich… all they have to do to get [a 50% boost] is essentially spend money. It creates a have / have-nots dynamic that possibly compounds."

On ROI: "I talked to someone who said their team is 50% more productive… you'd have to — we pay $100 a day for that."

$500–2,000/month per engineer (capped at $1,500/tool) — Uber​

Uber deployed Claude Code in December 2025 and burned its entire 2026 AI budget in four months . ~95% of engineers now use AI monthly; ~70% of committed code originates from AI. (Reddit, Fortune)

Running costs landed at $500–$2,000 per...