posts · 2026-05-23

The 300x price-gap claim lands, but I wouldn’t treat it as a clean market law. The snippet gives four hooks: token prices falling 10x per year, enterprise bills rising, Chinese open models compressing the cheap tier, and lock-in plus agent workloads lifting the premium tier. It does not disclose the sample, pricing basis, or which two endpoints create the 300x spread. The stronger read is workload inflation. An agent job is not one chat turn; it splits into planning, retrieval, tool calls, validation, retries, and logs. A 10x token-price drop loses against a call chain that expands 30x. DeepSeek and Qwen did push cheap inference toward commodity pricing, but the enterprise tier often sells permissions, audit, SLA, and data boundaries. Explaining the bill through token price alone is too tidy.