Cost vs Quality Tradeoff

Quality without cost context is half a decision. You need the Pareto frontier — for each quality bar, what's the cheapest config that hits it?

When to Use

• Choosing a default model for a new feature
• Reducing LLM spend on an existing feature
• Justifying (or not) an upgrade to a premium model
• Trading off prompt complexity, model size, and thinking budget

The Pareto Frontier

Plot each candidate config (model × prompt × settings) on quality (y-axis) vs cost per request (x-axis). The frontier is the set of configs where no other config is both cheaper AND better.

Any config NOT on the frontier is dominated — always strictly worse than another option. Drop it.