AI Costs Out of Control? What Meta Engineers' Token Budget Caps Mean

In 2026, the cost per call for an AI video generation tool has dropped to $0.002, but when my team tested Meta's AI image generation feature last month, we found that a standard project consumed over 100k tokens in a single day—at current pricing, that’s $200/day or $6,000/month. This isn't an isolated case. Just this week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told TechCrunch he expects Meta might cap the AI token budget per engineer within the next year or two. This signal is more worth paying attention to for content creators than any model release.