Every choice has a price and the bill always comes due. Marketers are only just starting to work out what theirs actually costs for AI.
Laura Higgins had been at Dollar Shave Club for two months when she started paying attention to her AI bill. During her first month as the company’s new chief brand and innovation officer, she ran everything, from concepting ad campaigns to the routine back-and-forth of everyday questions, through the tools available to her — Claude, ChatGPT, Higgsfield and Gemini — without much thought for what it was costing.
“I have no idea what that bill looks like,” she said of that early stretch, chalking it up to an experimental phase. It didn’t last. Within weeks, Higgins had built herself a rough triage system: cheaper tools like Gemini for simple tasks, heavier models reserved for work that actually needed them. The shift from unmetered exploration to token discipline — or figuring out, in her words, how not to “burn up my tokens” — took about a month.
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