The Price Floor

What does it actually cost to run a frontier-class open model? I measured DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 across every layer in August 2026: why the same weights run 5x faster in a different inference engine, prefill versus decode, why speculative-decoding gains don't transfer between stacks, measured cloud throughput against the listed figures, the prompt-cache price that dominates agent workloads, the…