Startup Cuts AI Bill from $1.2M to $100K Monthly

Polsia used frontier models for four months while growing from 500 users to 5,000 paying customers at $1.2M monthly cost for agentic AI. After two months of configuration on rented GPUs with open weight models, the bill fell to roughly $100K in June. The shift shows how open alternatives make large-scale agent execution economically feasible once initial closed-model spending proves the use case, per comments from Kim Isenberg and Robert Scoble on Ben Cera's episode.