Skipping a model layer is costing you
Cost
Token spend arrives as one invoice with no team attribution. Everyone defaults to the frontier model. Reasoning models cost multiples of a standard call, untracked. One looping job can burn a month of budget overnight.
Reliability
A deprecated model means a code change in ten services. A provider outage takes production down with no fallback. Provider lock-in — nothing routes around a bad vendor.
Security
PII goes to third-party providers because masking was never anybody's job. Prompt injection and jailbreak attempts arrive unscreened.
Governance
Provider keys are handed out directly — nothing to revoke, cap, or audit. No record of which prompt hit which model. Every team writes its own retry, fallback, and logging code.