The context shrinkage is the part I would emphasise. Everyone quotes a window in tokens and reasons about it in pages, and the conversion between the two is silently language-dependent. If you build a product around a fixed document size you have accidentally built one that works for some of your users and truncates for the rest.

这个我们早就发现了 同一份合同 中文版的 token 数差不多是英文版的两倍 报价的时候按英文算 上线之后账单直接翻倍 后来只能自己按语言分开定价 客户还觉得我们在乱收费

billing unit is the vendors internal cost unit and everyone just accepted it. nobody charges for storage by inode

That is the cleanest way to put it. Tokens are an implementation detail that leaked all the way onto the invoice, and once it is on the invoice it stops being neutral. Pricing per character or per word would be slightly worse for the vendor's margin modelling and considerably fairer to everyone outside the tokenizer's training distribution.