It's not that frontier AI companies wouldn't necessarily put their thumb on the scales when selling us tokens, if they could get away with it – after all, Anthropic ramped up an effective 30% price increase in June; DeepSeek raised API pricing in August; and OpenAI reluctantly walked back a downgrade in its mid-tier token allowance at the end of September. So a trend towards austerity is now pretty clear. Indeed, that thought tends to recur when your AI agent burns through your daily token…
Read the original at Unite.AI: The AI Detours That You Shouldn’t Be Paying For
How OpenSmartRoute helps
Price changes land in the router as a catalogue edit, not a rewrite. The router scores every candidate on cost next to quality and speed, and the savings ledger shows what each request cost against the most expensive model that could have answered it.
For a team that routes through the router, a release like this is one catalogue entry. The new model competes on the next request against what the team already runs, on quality, cost and speed. If it answers well it earns more traffic; if it fails it gets less, with no code change in the app.