How Helmdeck runs serious agentic workflows on cheap and local LLMs — without the frontier model tax.
If you've shipped any real AI agent workflow in the past 18 months, you already know the dirty secret.
A single non-trivial run — deep research, multi-step browser work, code editing loops, slide generation, or desktop automation — routinely costs $0.20 to $0.50 on frontier-class models once you account for retries, long context, verification steps, and the inevitable "the model got confused halfway through" cycles.
Run that workflow a few hundred times and the bill gets painful fast. Run it thousands of times and the economics simply don't work for most teams or solo builders.
At Helmdeck we decided to stop accepting that math.
