Five frontier models now sit within five points of each other in terms of intelligence, but their cost per unit differs by 3.8x.
Google’s Argon prices at the bottom of the cluster at $1.99 a task1, 74% below the most expensive model, Fable 5.1. It is also 67% below Opus 5.5, 56% below Muse Wonder & 39% below Astra.
One search ad every 40 minutes pays for a trillion-parameter model. One content ad every 3 minutes does the same. The math on ad-supported AI is better than you think.
When Anthropic pulled Claude Code from the $20 plan last month, it signaled an industry assumption : frontier intelligence requires frontier pricing. For open models, the economics flip.
A B200 GPU costs $4.50/hour on spot markets.1 Google Search ads generate $38.40 CPM (cost per thousand impressions),2 while Google Display runs $3.12.3