Retirement, price increases, and the last reason of all: "supply sovereignty"
A model I had picked, measured, and optimized around was retired by a notice one morning. And it wasn't just one. The whole cheap tier disappeared, and the only survivor was the most expensive one — priced at 5x its predecessor on output.
I could control latency, I could control cost — but the base model itself was the one thing I never had a grip on. This is where supply sovereignty stands up as a third axis of judgment, alongside speed and cost.
Self-hosting isn't just about getting it running, though. Off-the-shelf small models lost on quality (42–69% vs 94%). And the reason I could react to a six-days-left crisis at all was that I had measurement infrastructure — a way to check whether a replacement would hold up, with no human in the loop.
The first three parts were all about making performance better with my own hands. Measure, break it down, pull the lever. But no matter how much optimization I stacked up, there was one layer left that I could do nothing about: the base model itself.
