The value frontier

Every model, plotted by what it costs against how good it is. The staircase is the frontier: nothing beats those models on both axes at once. Everything below and to the right is a strictly worse deal — there is something both smarter and cheaper.

Changing the workload below moves the frontier less than you would expect: 91% of frontier models are on it under every workload (only Solar Pro 4 moves). What does change is the price — the same model swings up to 4× across these shapes. So the control is not about which models to consider. It is about what you would actually pay for them.