Top tech firms once cultivated cachet with in-house chefs or office amenities like tennis courts and on-tap craft beer. These days, the mark of success for some appears to be bragging about outsized AI spending—and BetaKit wants to know whether your workplace is on board.
TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz wrote earlier this month that big token budgets—tracking how much individual employees are spending on AI compute—have “become a badge of honour” for some companies, and a badge of shame for others.
Search the phrase “our AI bill” on LinkedIn and you’ll find lots of bragging about corporate invoices showing thousands of dollars in AI token costs in a single month (that search will also turn up plenty of parodies). Meta reportedly shut down its tokenmaxxing leaderboard, which ranked employees by their spending, after The Information reported that the company had cumulatively spent 60 trillion tokens in a single month. If Meta staff were using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 model (one of the more commonly used, daily-driver AI models), that could be $180 million USD ($245 million CAD) in AI spend in a single month. Shopify’s tokenmaxxing leaderboard, which was in place as recently as June 2025, has also since been shut down, according to tech newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer.
Udit Bhatnagar, partner at McRock Capital, told BetaKit during a DiscoveryX panel last week that he sees tokenmaxxing as a flawed measure of productivity when used in isolation—because companies need to look at outcomes, not just inputs. Or, as Neha Khera, managing partner at IRV, put it, increased AI spend might just mean “your initial prompt wasn’t good enough and you had to keep re-prompting to get what you wanted.”
All this chatter made us curious about the current state of token spending within Canadian tech. So, we’ve put together an informal and highly unscientific survey. Tell us whether or not you’re tokenmaxxing to the fullest here, or in the survey below.
Feature image by Sarah Rieger for BetaKit. Photo assets from Daniil Komov and Julio Lopez.
Correction (05/07/2026): An earlier version of this story misattributed Neha Khera’s quote to another speaker.