Speaking as someone who's bootstrapping here, I'm often envious of engineers at these larger companies, but I also worry that the incentives are screwed up.

If I were an engineer at Uber, why wouldn't I select gpt 5.5 pro @ very high thinking + fast mode for a prompt? There's no incentive not to use the most powerful (and thus most expensive) model for even the smallest of changes.

I tried one of these prompts for some tests I'm doing for image->html conversion, and a single prompt cost me $40. For someone that's paying that themselves, I'd pretty much never use this configuration. For someone at a large company where someone else is footing the bill, I'd spin these up regularly (the output was significantly better, fwiw). For engineers they're being rated on what they deliver, not the expenditure to get there.

There are ways to do this cheaply, but there are no incentives for engineers to do so.