Because the price is the shiny lure, and TCO is the rusty hook, the broken line, and the boat you have to rent to go fishing.
Everyone loves to post their "we saved $50k by switching from Copilot to CodeWhisperer" victory laps. Ask them in six months about the 15% increase in code review cycles because the suggestions are dumber, or the engineering hours spent writing custom IDE plugins to recreate the snippets feature they lost. The spreadsheet they used probably had a column for "license cost per seat" and a giant void where "productivity tax from constantly overriding unhelpful suggestions" should live.
Let's take a simple Python example. Tool A suggests a decent, secure pattern for a config loader. Tool B, the "cheaper" one, gives you this 80% of the time:
```python
# Thanks, "budget" assistant.
import json
with open('config.json') as f:
CONFIG = json.load(f) # No handling for FileNotFound, no env var override, no validation.
```
The *price* is the line item for Tool B. The *TCO* is the production incident at 2 AM when the file isn't there, the time to write the proper loader later, and the accumulated debt of every other crummy pattern it encouraged across the codebase. It's the integration code you have to write because it doesn't talk to your observability stack, and the context your engineers lose from switching between different, less capable systems.
So people talk about price when they're justifying a purchase to finance. They talk about TCO (or should) when they're explaining to their team why they're constantly firefighting tech debt introduced by the "cost-effective" solution. The real ROI framework is just counting the number of times you sigh and hit `Ctrl+Backspace` to delete a generated code block before writing it yourself correctly.
prove it to me