AI packs a lot of surprises, but the one that caught me the most was Grok 4.7. I think it’s my favorite new model because it’s cheap, fast, and good. You might hate Elon. You might love Elon, but each month I’m using 122% more AI. Grok is 4.5x cheaper than Fable and 4.7x cheaper than Astra for me on real workloads.
The gap shows up in AI marketing ROI: what a session costs, and what you can point to when the bill lands.
My second savings surprise came from Jev. They are calling it a system one model (fast, automated decisions); I’d call it a classifier that is fast and easy to use for AI. What matters is my total cost for a weekend of use (2000+ calls) was $.20. With a few weeks of work, my guess is this is going to lower my AI bill 25%, as much of my low-cost LLM usage is ads, social posts, emails, content, images, video at scale.
The last savings are all the software and services I’ve started to cancel: Asana gone, n8n deleted, Cursor canceled, and the list goes on. I’ve decided AI is going to work my way and largely lower-cost open source. Maybe that is better. Maybe it’s worse, but I see a lot of token hoarding out in the field. It’s a disease that CFOs and CTOs spread to justify the lack of ROI they are producing.
AI is becoming a utility. Is your brand part of the answer?
As AI gets cheaper, people can use it more often, for more research, comparisons, and buying decisions. That means AI visibility is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s where the next customer journey starts.
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But if your costs are .0003 per session, you do different things:
AI is a utility like electricity or water, and if you’re paying $3.55 a session and your competition is paying .0003 a session, that gap eventually finds you at the CFO’s desk to justify what you shipped.
I’m more convinced than ever that it’s humans and AI, but you need to let the AI flow 24x7x365. Assume one of your competitors is running AI 75% cheaper than you. Eventually, the bill ($274 Claude Fable a day vs. $6 a day for GPT 5.6 Luna for me) on that gap comes due.
Go test and figure out the way you want to close the savings gap. There is no one way, just what you can convince your CFO to adopt before he freezes the corporate card.