Roughly two years ago, running a strong model over every support ticket, every document, every code review would have been absurd on cost alone. This quarter the same work costs a fraction of that. The curve has bent faster than almost anyone's budget assumed.
What suddenly becomes affordable
- Running analysis over everything, not a sampled slice. Read every ticket, not one in ten.
- Multiple passes per task. Draft, critique and revise for the price of a single call a year ago.
- Background work nobody used to justify: labelling, summarising and enriching data continuously rather than on demand.
When a thing gets ten times cheaper, you don't do the same amount for less. You do things you would never have started.
The catch
Cheap tokens make it easy to spend a lot of them badly. The teams getting value are the ones treating model calls like any other unit cost: measured, capped and attached to an outcome. The teams in trouble are the ones who noticed the price drop and stopped counting.
Worth your time
- A running chart of frontier price-per-token over time.
- Thinking in Systems, on why cheaper inputs change behaviour, not just budgets.