Falling token costs drive enterprise adoption of budget open models

US enterprises are increasingly adopting lower-cost AI models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, securing 60 to 90 per cent savings over US alternatives. Meanwhile, an 80 per cent drop in token prices over the past 18 months has triggered the Jevons paradox, driving surging consumption even as infrastructure capital expenses remain exceptionally high.

Engineering teams must balance unit-cost savings against aggregate compute demand when designing scalable, cost-efficient production architectures.

  • Adopting models like DeepSeek and Qwen offers organisations 60 to 90 per cent cost reductions over domestic options.
  • Token prices plummeted by 80 per cent across an 18-month period.
  • The Jevons paradox means cheaper inference is expanding total usage rather than shrinking aggregate capital expenditure.
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