#ai-economics

Open-weight models now run 10-12x cheaper than frontier SaaS. A 2026 framework on the TCO crossover, vendor lock-in, and data sovereignty for agencies.

DeepSeek abandons its no-outside-capital stance in a ~$7.4B maiden round led by Tencent and CATL, valuing it near $59B and reshaping open-weight economics.

Forecast monthly LLM token spend by client tier, workflow, model mix. Downloadable forecasting model + reconciliation cadence for agency CFOs.

Where agencies deploy agents, monthly token spend, ROI, blockers, and 2026 staffing changes. Original quantitative data from 250 marketing/dev agencies.

How much agencies spend per agentic SEO audit, content brief, ad-copy iteration, and client report — with revenue lift attributed. 50 measured workflows.

Why $/token is the wrong unit and $/successful-task is the right one. Formulas, worked examples across 6 task families, and a downloadable scoring template.

Anthropic's Opus leads spend at $25.1M/month but Xiaomi dominates volume at 5.49T tokens. The cost-routing story behind OpenRouter's Q2 2026 data.

Q2 2026 LLM API pricing update — cost-per-token deltas for GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1, Qwen 3.5/3.6 family, MiMo V2, and ultra-low tier.

10M token context window economics — when long context outperforms RAG, infrastructure costs, and real-world agency workflows that actually use it.

Q2 2026 efficient-frontier analysis — Pareto scatter plots mapping speed, quality, and cost across 20 frontier models. Identifies the dominant strategies.