Most teams architect for capability and optimize for cost after the invoice lands. Here is the playbook for building cost constraints in from day one: task profile audits, three-tier routing, and synthetic benchmarking before your first deploy.
Teams default to vibe-based model selection because they lack production data pre-launch. A profiling harness resolves the catch-22: build a synthetic task corpus, define quality oracles as code, run every tier, and read cost_per_success from data before the first request.
Why frontier model defaults bloat inference bills, and the per-task quality SLO framework that makes model selection explicit, testable, and owned — instead of inherited from prototype defaults.