Death by API

The 5-Year API Reckoning For Enterprises Running Agents Built by Awai Impact

Your agents are quietly
spending bleeding
your budget.

Every agent you wire to a closed-source LLM is a meter that never stops running. Tokens flow. Prices climb. Workloads grow. Find out what the next five years actually cost you — then ask whether you needed to pay any of it.

RUN COST PROJECTION
MODEL: ENTERPRISE AGENT · COST GROWTH 20% Y/Y
Agents running today01 / 02
How many AI agents are live in your organisation right now?
Agents you plan to add02 / 02
How many more agents will you deploy in the next 3 years?
Your projected 5-year API spend
$0
Set your numbers on the left →
Avg cost per agent / month$300
Annual cost inflation+20%
Year 1 spend
Year 2 spend
Year 3 spend
Year 4 spend
Year 5 spend
5-Year total
Why 20% per year? A portion comes from raw API price drift and provider repricing. The larger portion is token inflation: as your agents mature they consume more context, run longer reasoning chains, call more tools, and handle richer multimodal inputs. The same agent doing the same job costs measurably more next year than it does today — because it’s no longer doing exactly the same job.
About the $300 baseline $300 / agent / month is a reasonable industry midpoint for an always-on enterprise agent. Real costs vary widely: a lightweight classification or routing agent can run as low as $50 / month, while a heavy research, RAG, or long-context reasoning agent can climb past $2,000 / month. Treat this calculator as a directional estimate, not a quote.

Keep paying — or get unplugged.

Most enterprise agents perform narrow, well-defined jobs. They classify, route, summarise, extract, schedule, draft, validate. A 7B–70B open-source model — fine-tuned on your data, running on hardware you control — handles these tasks just as well as a frontier API. Sometimes better. Always cheaper.

Get unplugged. Go open source.
DIY · Self-hosted · Full sovereignty
$0
PER MONTH · FOREVER
  • Open-source weights, your hardware, your data
  • No per-token billing, no rate limits, no surprise invoices
  • Your agents keep running if the vendor disappears
  • GDPR, EU AI Act, sector compliance built in by default
  • Community models: Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma, DeepSeek
  • You build the pipeline. We just told you it works.
Read the playbook →

Specialist agents don’t need a frontier LLM.

A frontier API is general intelligence rented by the token. Most agents in production don’t need general intelligence. They need a model that’s good enough at one thing, runs predictably, and never sends your customer data through someone else’s datacenter.

When an agent’s job is bounded — “extract these 12 fields from an invoice”, “draft a reply in this tone”, “route this ticket to the right queue” — a tuned open-source model matches or beats the closed-API equivalent on the metric that actually matters: task completion at your acceptable error rate.

  • EVIDENCE 01
    Specialist tuning beats general scaleA 13B model fine-tuned on your domain routinely outperforms a 200B+ generalist on narrow tasks.
  • EVIDENCE 02
    Latency you controlNo outbound API calls means sub-100ms responses and no third-party outages taking your agents down.
  • EVIDENCE 03
    Cost stops being a variableHardware amortises. Tokens don’t. Your finance team will notice.

Don’t get buried in API fees.
Get unplugged. Live happily ever after.

Tell us what your agents do today. We’ll come back with a migration plan, a fixed fee, and a clear answer on whether each agent should leave the API behind.

✓ Thanks. We’ll be in touch within two business days from Sweden. Stop renting your intelligence.
☠ DEATH BY API Part of the Lytrion sovereignty framework · Built by Awai Impact AB · Sweden Stop renting your intelligence.