The Meat-Based Token
September 14, 2026
Word is that every LLM provider is currently running at a loss.
Which makes for a curious thought experiment: what is the competitive cost of a token?
Let us price 1M output tokens from a meat-based programmer at the senior grade.
Salary of 350,000 roubles a month; with payroll contributions (~30%) an hour of their time costs the employer roughly 3,000 roubles.
The theoretical ceiling is typing flat out for an hour: 250 characters/min × 60 = 15,000 characters an hour; at 3.5 characters per token that comes to about 4,286 tokens.
Price per 1M tokens: (3000 / 4286) × 10⁶ ≈ 700,000 roubles.
For comparison, 1M output tokens from Fable 5.1 costs $50, or roughly 4,200 roubles.
About 165 times cheaper.