Public Sector AI — GovTech ISV Tokenomics

56% dev cost savings. No capability compromise.

Government codebases skew routine — 80% of coding tasks are CRUD, legacy wrappers, and boilerplate. Reserve Opus for FedRAMP compliance and fraud logic. Run everything else on Gemini Flash.

BuildSDLC

RunCitizen Services

RunDocument Processing

ExtendProcurement Agent

Claude Opus 4.8

Orchestrator & Compliance

Frontier Reasoning

FedRAMP architecture
Benefits appeals logic
Procurement risk analysis

Gemini 3.5 Flash

Citizen Services & Processing

AA Score 81

FAQ & policy questions
FOIA redaction flagging
Contract data pulls

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite

High-Volume Lookups

AA Score 68

Status checks & refunds
Form scaffolding & CRUD
Notification templates

Scenario 1Build Phase

AI-Assisted Government Development

Three-tier routing across a GovTech platform codebase.

50% of tasks are routine CRUD and legacy wrappers (Flash-Lite), 30% are mid-complexity API adapters and IaC (Flash), and 20% are FedRAMP architecture, fraud detection, and rules engines (Opus).

57%

savings vs all-Opus

highest of any vertical — gov codebases skew routine

Comparison Baseline

Team Configuration

Team Size

12 devs

5 devs50 devs

Sprint Count

13 sprints

1 sprints26 sprints

Tasks/dev/sprint: 45

Total tasks: 7,020

Gemini Tiered

$1.74K

over 13 sprints · 12 developers

All Opus / Sprint

$307.80

All Sonnet / Sprint

$184.68

Gemini Tiered / Sprint

$133.60

Why government codebases save more

Legacy COBOL wrapping, permit form CRUD, and notification templates are pure generation tasks — Flash-Lite at $0.025 per task vs Opus at $0.45. With 80% of tasks in this category, the savings compound dramatically. Opus stays on FedRAMP identity design and fraud detection — where mistakes cost contracts.

Task Board — 21 tasks

Hover for routing rationale

Design FedRAMP-compliant identity federation (PIV/CAC)Opus

Architect multi-agency data governance modelOpus

Build AI-assisted fraud detection for benefits eligibilityOpus

Design ATO documentation generation pipelineOpus

Implement multi-jurisdiction business rules engineOpus

Build REST adapters for legacy COBOL benefits systemsFlash

Generate IaC templates for GovCloud deploymentFlash

Write E2E tests for disability claims workflowFlash

Implement PII audit logging across all data accessFlash

Build form validation for 15 federal permit typesFlash

Generate OpenAPI specs for inter-agency data exchangeFlash

Scaffold CRUD for benefit recipient profilesFlash-Lite

Generate permit status notification email templatesFlash-Lite

Write DB migration scripts for contact schema updatesFlash-Lite

Add address validation to all form inputsFlash-Lite

Seed fixture data for 50 test agency accountsFlash-Lite

Write unit tests for 40 REST endpointsFlash-Lite

Generate Storybook stories for gov design systemFlash-Lite

Write Dockerfile for FIPS 140-2 compliant local devFlash-Lite

Build CSV export for agency reporting dashboardFlash-Lite

Create Swagger docs for public-facing citizen APIFlash-Lite

5 Opus6 Flash10 Flash-Lite

Total Cost Comparison (13 sprints)

Gemini Tiered vs All Opus — 13 sprints

$2.26K

57% reduction · same Opus on compliance tasks, Flash-Lite on the other 80%

Scenario 2 — Run Phase

Citizen Services Chatbot

65% of citizen queries are simple status lookups — route them on Flash-Lite. Reserve Opus for SNAP appeals and federal contract disputes where the stakes are highest.

Ask your citizen services portal

Select a question

Select a question above to compare model responses

Monthly Query Volume

5.0M

500K50M

Tiered Routing Mix

65% Flash-Lite

Status checks, refund lookups

25% Flash

Policy FAQ, permit info

10% Opus

Appeals, contract disputes

Per-Query Cost

Annual Savings vs All-Opus

$938K

78% reduction on 5.0M/mo · $1.2M/yr → $262K/yr

Scenario 3 — Run Phase

Government Document Processing

Flash reads 1,842 FOIA pages in 0.7 seconds and flags redaction candidates. Opus interprets attorney-client privilege. You need both.

Select a document type

Extracted Findings — Federal RFP — IT Modernization (SOW)

Item	Status	Signal
Technical requirements	42 items extracted	↑ 8 flagged ambiguous
Compliance mandates	FedRAMP Moderate + FISMA High	→ confirms scope
Evaluation criteria	Price 30% / Technical 70%	→ T&E weighted
Small business set-aside	8(a) sole-source eligible	✓ Opportunity flag
Submission deadline	July 31, 2026 @ 4:00 PM ET	→ 47 days remaining

Processing Pipeline Race

Pure Claude Opus

3.6s

Quality: ★★★★★$0.1050/doc

Hybrid — Flash extract → Opus analyzeBest Value

2.4s

Quality: ★★★★★$0.0729/doc

Pure Gemini Flash

700ms

Quality: ★★★★☆$0.0333/doc

Documents / Year

1.0M

Pure Opus

$105K

Hybrid

$73K

Pure Flash

$33K

Hybrid vs Pure Opus

$32K saved/yr

31% reduction at 1.0M docs/year · same Opus quality on compliance analysis

Scenario 4Extend Phase

Nightly Procurement Compliance Agent

Reviews 5,000 active contracts per night — checking CPARS ratings, milestone dates, small business targets, and invoice approval status. 14 data-pull steps on Flash; compliance sign-off on Opus.

Planner — Opus

Executors (14) — Gemini Flash

Reviewer — Opus

Click any node to inspect token counts and cost

Cost per contract run

Planner (Opus)$0.1025

Executors ×14 (Flash)$0.2100

Reviewer (Opus)$0.1125

Total / contract$0.4250

Savings vs all-Opus: $0.4200/contract (50%)

Contracts / Night

50050K

Annual Cost (365 nights)

All Opus$1.5M

Gemini Tiered$776K

Annual Savings

$767K

50% reduction · Opus on 2 of 16 steps only

Optimal Frontier

Where model economics become business outcomes

Six routing strategies applied to the same CivicOS workload. Cost is calculated from existing token volumes; quality, latency, governance, and value remain inspectable.

The feasible frontier excludes routes that ship quality failures. Workload-aware routing preserves quality while avoiding frontier-model spend everywhere.

Cost × Quality

Existing defaults: six-month build plus one year of citizen, document, and agent activity

Raw Pareto frontier

Includes the absolute cheapest point even when it fails quality.

Quality-feasible frontier

Only strategies whose final requests all clear the quality bar.

E and F overlap on raw economics

Switch to Governance or Business Value to see GEAP separate.

AQuality risk

Cheapest

$158K

Quality: 4.2

Opus only

$2.9M

Quality: 5.0

Dominated by E

Claude stack

$2.0M

Quality: 5.0

Dominated by E

DFrontier

Gemini family

$684K

Quality: 4.7

EFrontier

Hybrid router

$858K

Quality: 5.0

FFrontier

GEAP

$858K

Quality: 5.0

The optimal answer is not one model.

Cheapest everywhere is quality-infeasible. Best everywhere wastes spend. Workload-aware routing reaches the efficient frontier; GEAP pushes it further when governance and business value enter the decision.

Lifecycle Summary

Public Sector savings across Build → Run → Extend, at your current slider settings.

Build Savings (one-time)

All-Frontier

→

Tiered

Save $0

Run Savings (annual)

All-Frontier

→

Tiered

Save $0

Extend Savings (annual)

All-Frontier

→

Tiered

Save $0

All-Frontier vs Tiered — By Phase

Total Annual Savings

Interact with the scenarios above to see your savings

By Scenario

S1 BuildInteract above to calculate

S2 Citizen ServicesInteract above to calculate

S3 DocumentsInteract above to calculate

S4 ProcurementInteract above to calculate