the gap between how AI tools market themselves and what they actually offer is getting wider

The AI tooling market is exhibiting a structural credibility problem: marketing claims around free tiers systematically obscure real cost models, including token-pass-through pricing, 48-hour trial windows, and rate-limited inference. Practitioners integrating tools pre-evaluation face compounding switching costs after workflow lock-in. Audit actual API pricing, token consumption rates, and tier limits before any production integration.