Pricing Crisis and Cost Optimization Race

Token-based billing horror stories (Copilot up to $750/month, Uber $1,500 cap) and Gartner prediction of costs overtaking salaries by 2028 drive cost-cutting. Open-weight models (Kimi K3, GLM-5.2, DeepSeek V4 Flash) undercut proprietary pricing by 10-50x. Cost optimization tools (Not Diamond, Elastic InfoSec loop, token-reduction tools) proliferate. Claude Opus 5 at half Fable 5 cost disrupts pricing. GitHub Copilot Code Review effort levels (Lite vs Balanced) now GA as a cost-control lever. New: Best Cheap AI Model guide provides cost-per-success methodology. OpenCode data shows DeepSeek at 70.9% token share with 96% cache ratio, reinforcing open-weight cost advantage.