The Inference Tax: How We Cut AI API Costs by 40% Using Small Language Models
At Ninth Post, we recently audited our internal agentic workflows and discovered a massive fiscal leak: we were paying an “Inference Tax.” We were using GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to handle basic classification and data formatting tasks that required less than 10% of their cognitive capacity. By March 2026, the novelty of “Big Models”…
