today's pricing announcement is a compute tax dressed as a launch.

you're not paying for capability anymore, you're paying for context length.

the framing is 'new tier'. the substance is a usage cap shaped around long agentic workflows.

the customers who pay the most under this scheme are exactly the ones running stateful agents that need long context. the customers who pay the least are the ones using the model like a search engine.

this isn't bad — it might be correct. compute is the cost; long contexts use more compute. but call it what it is.