●builderAt $30/M output tokens, task-level costs add up fast — 50 TypeScript files cost $54, so model selection and routing logic are now core engineering decisions.
●founderBudget blowouts at Uber, Microsoft, and GitHub signal that AI cost management is becoming a product category opportunity and an operational risk for AI-heavy startups.
●investorPricing pressure from open-weight models and commoditizing inference hardware threatens frontier lab margins — worth tracking as a structural risk to API-revenue business models.