Free tokens are a loan against your switching costs

A token credit is a discount you repay later. You repay it in the price of leaving.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and other top labs are handing startups free tokens right now. The Wall Street Journal reported it on July 7. The story reads as lab strategy, labs chasing durable enterprise revenue ahead of their IPOs. Fine. But look at it from your side of the table.

This is the cloud-credits playbook, rerun.

You remember that one. Cloud providers gave startups five and six figures in free compute. The credits felt like a gift. Then the workload grew, the data settled in, and moving it somewhere else cost more than the credits ever saved. The discount was real. The lock-in was more real.

Tokens work the same way. A credit lowers your bill today and raises your cost of leaving tomorrow. That cost of leaving is the whole point. The labs aren't buying your usage. They're buying your inertia.

And the timing tells you why. Open-weight models are turning the model layer into a commodity. The frontier premium is a negotiable line, not a law of nature. In a market where prices fall every quarter, nobody protects margin by winning on price. You protect margin by getting the term commitment signed before the price drops. So the credit shows up now, ahead of the competition, to lock the number in while the number still looks big.

The runtime and the credit are the new lock-in layer. Not the model.

None of this makes the labs villains. They're behaving rationally. A credit is a normal commercial instrument, and it has a price like any other. Your job is to read the price.

So before anyone accepts an offer, make the person who owns the contract answer two questions in writing.

One. What does the credit require? Term, spend floor, or platform exclusivity. Name it.

Two. What would it cost to move the same workload to open-model spot prices today?

Put both numbers next to each other. If the credit pays out only against a multi-year commit, then you're not pricing a credit. You're pricing the commit. Price the commit.

In a falling-price market, a term commitment is what you sell, not what you buy.

Take the free tokens. Just know what you signed.