Every THE D[AI]LY BRIEF article on unit economics — enterprise AI analysis, benchmarks, vendor comparisons, and ROI frameworks for technology and business leaders. Updated as new coverage publishes.
Training a custom model costs about $30. Serving the same weights costs $326 to $28,908 a month depending on the platform. The fine-tuning-versus-RAG decision is a serving-contract decision, and the break-even is 683,000 queries.
September 9, 2026 · 20 min read
A production RAG pipeline at 10M tokens a day costs about $1,308 a month, 61% of it generation and one dollar of it embeddings. The line that wrecks the budget is document parsing, which swings from $2,100 to $90,000 over the same 2 million pages.
August 17, 2026 · 21 min read
Airbnb put five AI productivity numbers on the record at Q2 earnings. Four are activity counts only Airbnb can define. One — support cost per booking, down about 16% — is the only figure a filed line item actually moves with.
August 9, 2026 · 12 min read