Source: Cloudflare Blog
Cloudflare's AI code reviewer dropped from $1.19 to approximately $0.38 per review in four months—a concrete demonstration that LLM operational costs aren't fixed but highly malleable through engineering discipline. This matters because it shifts the narrative from "AI is expensive" to "most companies haven't optimized yet." As inference becomes commoditized and margin pressure increases, the competitive advantage will accrue to teams obsessive about batching, quantization, and model selection rather than those betting on raw hardware improvements alone.