Own the model

Point a task at a frontier API and you've made two decisions: rent the intelligence, hand your data to someone else's server. Sometimes that's right. Often you reached for the biggest model because it was there, not because the job needed it. Classification, extraction, routing don't need frontier reasoning. An open-weight model you run yourself does them cheaper and keeps the data in the building, and Qwen and DeepSeek are closing the gap fast. Save the frontier for the problems that actually earn it.