Keep Opus. Route the rest.
Across the whole lifecycle.
Opus is the strongest choice for the work that genuinely needs deep judgment. The mistake is paying for that level on every task. Pair Opus with Gemini Flash and Flash-Lite for routine execution, and the stack is cheaper and faster than pairing Opus with Sonnet.
Claude Opus 4.8
Architecture, judgment, final review
$5 / $25 per 1M
Gemini 3.5 Flash
Fast execution and multimodal work
$1.50 / $9 per 1M
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
High-volume lookups and transforms
$0.25 / $1.50 per 1M
Claude Sonnet 4.6
The conventional mid-tier pairing
$3 / $15 per 1M
Gemini 3.1 Pro scores 92 on the Artificial Analysis (AA) Intelligence Index vs Claude Opus 4.8 at 89. AA Intelligence Index scores as of Q2 2026. See artificialanalysis.ai for current rankings.
AI-Assisted Software Development
Your engineers don't need frontier intelligence for every task.
75% of coding tasks are routine — tests, scaffolds, docs, CRUD. Keep Opus on architecture and hard debugging. Route the routine 75% to Flash instead of Sonnet.
Routing Strategy
Team Configuration
Opus + Gemini Cost
$0.00
over 13 sprints · 12 developers
You save
$0.00
Opus + Sonnet / Sprint
$256.50
Sonnet routine + Opus complex
Opus + Gemini / Sprint
$202.50
Flash routine + Opus complex
Task Board — 20 tasks
Hover for routing rationale
Task Mix
Cost Comparison
Model Pricing (per 1M tokens)
Bottom line: A 12-person team saves $702.00 over 13 sprints vs Opus + Sonnet. Opus handles the same complex work in both routes; Flash replaces Sonnet only on routine tasks.
In-App Intelligence
Same question. One answer costs 10–20× less. Can you tell?
Select a question
Select a question above to compare model responses
Monthly Query Volume
Adjust to match your expected in-app traffic
Monthly COGS Comparison
Opus + Sonnet
$0.000000
$778K/yr
Opus + Gemini
$0.000000
$294K/yr
Tiered routing mix
Monthly: $40K saved · Opus + Gemini: $25K/mo vs Opus + Sonnet: $65K/mo
Honesty note: The same 12% of complex planning questions route to Opus in both architectures. The difference is the routine 88%: Sonnet in the baseline, Flash-Lite and Flash in the recommended route.
Multimodal & Latency
Client photographs a statement and asks “what changed?” — keeping Opus for financial reasoning while comparing Sonnet and Flash on extraction.
Incoming Statements
Pipeline Race — Text Mode
Extend · Scenario 4
Agentic Orchestration
Every night an agent reviews 50,000 portfolios. It decomposes each rebalancing job into 18 steps—only the planner and reviewer run on Opus. The 16 executor steps run on Gemini Flash.
Per-Run Cost Breakdown
Executor volume dominates total cost — this is where tiering shines.
Scale Simulator
Drag to set nightly portfolio volume. Costs scale linearly.
Nightly (Opus + Sonnet)
$29K
Nightly (Opus + Flash)
$20K
Opus + Sonnet
$10.7M
Opus + Flash
$7.2M
Annual Savings
$3.5M
33% reduction
Opus orchestrates. Gemini Flash executes.
Only 2 of 18 agent steps require top-tier reasoning — the planner that decomposes the rebalancing task and the compliance reviewer that signs off. Opus handles both in either architecture. The 16 executor steps (data retrieval, calculations, formatting) route to Gemini Flash instead of Sonnet. Total per-run cost drops from $0.5845 (Opus + Sonnet) to $0.3925. At 50K portfolios nightly, that's $3.5M/yr saved.
Where model economics become business outcomes
Six routing strategies applied to the same WealthAI workload. Cost is calculated from existing token volumes; quality, latency, governance, and value remain inspectable.
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
Accumulated savings across Build → Run → Extend, driven by your current slider configurations.