Komilion Balanced Tier Beats Opus 4.6 on 6 of 10 Developer Tasks at Half the Cost

The safe default for AI API calls is to route everything to the best model you can afford. I did it for months. Opus for every request -- commit messages, variable lookups, SQL optimization, architecture. All $0.17/call. We ran the numbers to see if that assumption holds. Ten real developer tasks. Real API calls. Real billing. We sent each task through three setups: Komilion frugal tier, Komilion balanced tier, and Claude Opus 4.6 called directly via the Anthropic API. The result: the balanced tier beat Opus on 6 of 10 tasks at half the cost. Frugal delivered 97% of Opus quality at 1.6% of the cost. The Setup 3 configurations, 10 tasks: Tier Model selection Cost/task Frugal Cheapest capable model, auto-selected ~$0.003 avg Balanced Mid-tier, optimized for developer tasks ~$0.08 Opus 4.6 direct Claude Opus 4.6 via Anthropic API directly ~$0.17 10 tasks from real developer work: code generation, debugging, explanation, SQL optimization, architecture design, commit messages, and more. Jud