Dispatch · Infrastructure ·

Inference cost is the quiet product constraint

GPU bills and per-request AI costs decide which features survive contact with real users.

A feature can look magical in a demo and still die in production. The usual killer is quiet: inference cost.

Every request that hits a large model has a price. At low traffic you do not feel it. At client scale, or with chatty agents, the bill becomes the product constraint.

Questions to ask before you ship an AI feature

  • Can this run on a smaller model, a cache, or a batch job?
  • Is the AI call on the critical path, or can it happen asynchronously?
  • What happens if the provider raises prices next quarter?

Why builders should care

Life of AI is about shipping. Infrastructure economics are part of shipping — not just research news. If the feature cannot survive the bill, it is not a feature yet.

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