Open-weight models ran 56% of Vercel's gateway tokens for 14 cents of every dollar

Take the two shares Vercel published for August and divide them. Open-weight models ran 56% of gateway tokens and took 14 cents of every estimated dollar ^[1][5]. Closed models ran the other 44% for 86 cents ^[1]. The average closed token therefore cost about 7.8 times the average open one: 86 over 44 is 1.95, 14 over 56 is 0.25, and 1.95 divided by 0.25 is 7.8 ^[2].

That ratio is why the gateway-wide price number moves faster than most bills. The average fell about three times as fast as the median team's own price per token, 23.2% against 7.6% ^[3]. Vercel credits growth in open-weight adoption for part of the gateway-wide drop, which it calls its steepest since April ^[13]. Vercel also says the average token now costs less than half what it did five months ago ^[12]. Most of that came from which models the traffic ran on, so a team holding its approved model list steady tracked the median.

Inside the spend table, the substitution stayed in one vendor's price list. Fable 5, Anthropic's most capable model, went from 13.2% of gateway spend in July to 4.9% in August, and Opus 5 climbed to 22.5% ^[7]. Nine in ten teams running Fable cut their usage, and more of them moved to Opus 5 than to any other model ^[8]. Opus gained almost twice the usage Fable lost, which Vercel attributes to the newer model handling the same workloads at roughly half the price ^[9]. "Lab loyalty doesn't follow brand, it follows model profile, and consistency wins," Vercel's report says ^[10].

The New Stack argues the falling price is buyers spending on the harness, the software that supplies context, connects tools, routes work and checks results ^[18]. Vercel's chief executive describes that layer as unfinished. "This is very likely just the start, because enterprise adoption is still early, and harnesses, CLIs, IDEs, SDKs, etc need to be adapted to be model agnostic," Guillermo Rauch wrote ^[11]. Where the data does show cross-lab movement, price explains most of it: Gemini 3 Flash has lost 95% of its token share since May, more than three-quarters of that going to other labs, with about half the departing volume landing on cheaper models ^[16][17].

Before carrying a 23.2% decline into a budget, check the denominator. Vercel counts input and output tokens plus reasoning, cached-input and cache-creation tokens, across applications running on its own infrastructure ^[14][15]. An average computed that way moves when prompt-cache hit rates move, with an identical model list. For the decline to show up in someone else's bill, their mix of reasoning and cached tokens has to resemble the gateway's.

Zed's launch puts the harness argument into a product. Zed launched Delta in public beta, organising code collaboration around shared threads instead of pull requests, and says 33 of its team members landed 570 changes to Delta's main branch without opening one ^[19][20]. The public Zed editor repository still accepts conventional pull requests ^[21]. The new workflow gets the new repo first. "It seems like everyone is in a race to replace GitHub right now," Zed chief executive Nathan Sobo said ^[22].