Rightsizing My Agent Spend: From Opus to DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

Eleven agents on Claude Opus 4.8 were burning more than $150 a week, so I shut them off. Moving the fleet to DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 cut inference roughly 96x on output — and the same model runs just as well locally on my M5 Max as it does through the Vercel AI Gateway. The model swap was one line per bot; the platform underneath it was the actual work.