A 21-year-old founder at Turbo AI, an early-stage artificial intelligence startup, did not intend to spend $30,000 on AI tokens in a single month. The invoice arrived anyway.
AI tokens are the unit of consumption used by large language models (LLMs), the underlying technology powering tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Every word processed, every prompt sent, every response generated draws down a token balance. For most businesses, this is a manageable line item: the median monthly spend on AI tokens sits at approximately $2,246, according to data from Ramp. The Turbo AI founder Sarthak Dhawan's bill was roughly 13 times that figure.
