AI cache economics: check the bill before you buy
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Almost every input token was cached, yet cached-input charges still made up most of the token bill. In Fireworks' DeepSWE run of DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, 99.6% of input tokens were cached and those charges accounted for 59.9% of the $0.4295 per-task token bill. One run doesn't establish a universal cost ratio. It does give buyers a reason to inspect the cached share of their own spending before negotiating an AI contract.
Augur's analysis separates cache hit rate from spending share, explains why DeepSeek's reported 155 trillion served tokens per day includes cache reuse, and…
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