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Cost

4 posts on cost.

MiniMax H3: the Hailuo image-to-video model, in practice

H3 sits third on the image-to-video arena, generates its own stereo audio in the same pass, and turns a client photograph into five seconds of video for forty cents. It also ships open weights under a licence that excludes the United States by name. Both of those are true, and a studio has to hold both.

Which AI video model should a small studio use in 2026

OpenAI removes Sora from its API on 24 September. I re-priced the whole field off vendor rate cards rather than blog posts: what five seconds of video costs on each model, where the arena actually ranks them, and the licence clauses that decide it before the quality does.

LLM model routing: a ladder, a cascade, and a kill switch

LLM model routing is two problems: a ladder that picks the model tier by what a wrong answer costs, and a cascade that answers when a provider dies. Here is how both are built, with the real chain, the real prices, and the paper that explains why the second one will not save you money.

Most of my AI bill was re-reading my own transcript

My usage dashboard blamed subagents and had a fix ready. Twenty minutes of tallying the raw transcripts said the opposite: the ten most expensive sessions of the week spawned no agents at all, and almost every token I paid for was the same conversation being read again.

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