Mis-tiered models are silently inflating your $/token.
Models get updated. Traffic patterns shift. Token compression reduces context length. The GPU you correctly sized six months ago may be wrong today — costing you more per token than necessary. Nothing in your monitoring stack will tell you until the bill arrives or throughput collapses.
The result: Tier misplacement that could have been caught at deploy time becomes months of avoidable cost per token — and a $/token you can't explain to your CFO or your customers.


