Free tokens look generous. They're not a contract. They're an experiment. When you wire a free LLM quota into production, you're betting your response time and your team's sleep on someone else's queue. That can be a fine bet. But it needs to be measured, not assumed. In the past month I've watched two teams adopt free model access for their core feature. Both saw a demo that worked. Both hit latency spikes when traffic doubled. One recovered after adding retries; the other spent a full sprin...