Provider Concentration Audit (Retention)

Provider Concentration Audit (Retention)

1. 01

   Pull a 90-day token and spend ledger per client engagement before the renewal conversation

   Break the ledger out by provider and by model tier so the renewal deck shows where inference dollars actually land, not a single blended line item.

2. 02

   Flag any engagement where one provider carries more than 60 percent of inference volume

   That threshold is the point where a pricing change or capability shift at a single vendor becomes a margin event for the agency rather than a routing tweak.

3. 03

   Map every hard-coded model string, SDK call, and prompt template to its owning repository

   Gateways such as Helicone and Portkey centralize routing, but direct SDK calls buried in client codebases are the ones that quietly lock an account to one vendor.

4. 04

   Test one secondary provider against the client's three highest-volume tasks

   Run the same prompts through a second model family and record output quality, latency, and cost per thousand calls. Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens with a 1M context window is a useful low-cost baseline for high-volume summarization and classification work.

5. 05

   Quantify the switching cost in hours, not adjectives

   Estimate engineering hours to re-point the integration, retest prompts, and revalidate outputs. Anything under 16 hours is a cheap hedge; anything over 80 hours is a retainer risk worth naming to the client.

6. 06

   Document a fallback path for each critical workflow and store it with the account plan

   The fallback does not need to be production-ready. It needs to exist, be dated, and name the provider, model, and owner so a renewal conversation has a concrete answer instead of a promise.

7. 07

   Present the concentration findings as a line item in the renewal proposal

   Frame multi-provider readiness as continuity insurance for the client's production systems. It converts a technical risk into a scoped, billable workstream rather than a discount request.