Yesterday I posted about inference price war pushing margin down. But I since learned inference scammers are a thing with shady price manipulations: As inference providers, - You can lower your input token price 100x cheaper but up your output price 5x. You rank higher in openrouter in price but tots cost is much higher. - You can quantize the model to serve cheaply but users are buying a shittier model. - You can retain and sell user data elsewhere to make more money. - You can secretly swap to DeepSeek v4 flash but say it’s GLM 5.3 10% of the time. Therefore it’s hard to know 1. You get the model you ask for 2. You pay for the tokens you actually burn across cache input, input, output and 3. Your data is safe. I’m sure openrouter is working on it AND baseten, fireworks, together and other enterprise brands will continue to thrive even with higher pricing because they sell peace of mind.