Small vs Frontier Models: Right-Sizing Your AI Stack

Complex reasoning, long-document synthesis, high-stakes agent decisions, and anything where a quality miss is expensive — the top of your routing hierarchy, used deliberately.

Data-boundary mandates and extreme volume can justify self-hosted small models — priced honestly against ops burden, not ideology in either direction.

Skipping the discipline this article describes until an incident, audit, or stalled project forces it — every practice above is cheaper adopted early than retrofitted under pressure.