Inference Cost Floor
Inference Cost Floor is the practice of tracking the lowest available price per million tokens for a capability tier, then treating every drop as a trigger to re-price client retainers rather than a windfall to bank.
By InnovaAI ResearchPublished Updated
What is Inference Cost Floor?
“Token price floor → retainer re-pricing window”
Inference Cost Floor is the practice of tracking the lowest available price per million tokens for a capability tier, then treating every drop as a trigger to re-price client retainers rather than a windfall to bank. Agencies that price AI work on today's model economics get undercut the moment a cheaper tier ships, because the client's procurement team reads the same launch posts. Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 arrived at $0.10 per million input tokens with a 1 million token context window, which resets what high-volume document summarization and campaign analysis should cost a client. The framework has three moves: benchmark your current blended cost per deliverable, set a review cadence tied to model releases, and pre-agree with clients that savings split rather than vanish. Agencies running fixed-fee AI retainers without a floor review are quietly donating margin every quarter.