While I do agree that cost per task is what customers should care about, and not cost per token. Cost per token is an objective metric. Cost to do a task can vary a lot. Different tasks, different prompts, or just pure randomness nature of models make it a bit harder to define this as an objective metric.
Unless the cost per token is prohobitedly high, people can often try the model out themselves and make a subjective judgement of how effective and efficient is it at solving tasks they usually deal with, using their setup.
Unless the cost per token is prohobitedly high, people can often try the model out themselves and make a subjective judgement of how effective and efficient is it at solving tasks they usually deal with, using their setup.