Why your startup needs open models alongside frontier APIs

Every week, I talk with founders who are building at an unbelievable pace. Teams are moving from inception to product-market fit faster than ever, with foundation models wired deeply into their core product workflows. Yet as startup architectures mature, a clear divide has emerged between teams struggling with margins and those scaling sustainably. The most effective engineering teams have abandoned the one-size-fits-all model strategy. In the early days of LLMs the default architecture was simple: send every interaction to the largest model available. But as applications move into production,