What Does $1 of AI Actually Buy?

You can price a barrel of oil to the penny. Can you price a unit of intelligence? Most finance teams cannot, and that is the whole problem. Token pricing is opaque because every model charges differently for input and for output, and because intelligence itself is not standardized across vendors.

Normalize it

Start with a blended cost per million tokens at a fixed input-to-output ratio, so every model is on one axis. Then divide a credible benchmark score by that blended cost to get intelligence per dollar.

Done this way, the spread across the market is enormous. The cheapest frontier-class model can deliver several times the intelligence per dollar of the most expensive one. That spread is two things at once. It is your savings opportunity, and it is your negotiating leverage. You cannot use either until you have done the normalization.