
The cheapest model on the price sheet loops four times and still needs a human. Optimize dollars per task that worked, not dollars per million tokens.

The token savings are yours to count. The bad answer is your customer's to screenshot. Cheap is fine; cheap-and-unwatched is the trap.

Wire your app to a single provider and your reliability is capped at theirs. Their bad Tuesday becomes yours, with no second path to route around it.

Wiring models, re-tuning prompts after silent updates, and babysitting every provider's quirks is a recurring tax billed in your best engineers' time.

Leaderboard scores measure memorization and gaming, not your workload. The only test that predicts how a model behaves for you is your own traffic.

A flat fee is a bet against a cap the vendor controls. You overpay on the quiet weeks and get throttled on the loud one, with no vote either way.