VercelAmelia Charles6 min readintermediate
Open-weight models take 56% of token volume, Astra doubles Fable 5.1 spend
Summary
Vercel’s September AI Gateway Production Index shows open‑weight models processing 56% of token volume (up from 7% in Dec 2025) while accounting for only 14% of spend. Token price fell 23.2% month‑over‑month. Anthropic’s Opus 5 captured 22.5% of spend, overtaking Fable 5 which dropped to 4.9%. OpenAI’s new GPT‑6 Astra grabbed ~7.7% of total gateway spend in its first 12 days, more than double Ant…
- Open‑weight (open‑source) models now dominate token volume but remain a small fraction of spend, indicating lower per‑token cost.
- Average token price across the gateway fell 23.2% YoY, giving teams more inference for the same budget.
- Anthropic’s mid‑tier Opus 5 gained market share by offering roughly half the price of Fable 5 with comparable capability.
- Google’s Gemini 3 Flash saw massive churn, with >75% of its lost volume moving to other labs, highlighting the importance of price‑performance balance.
The shift toward open‑weight models and aggressive price competition reshapes how enterprises allocate inference budgets, favoring cost‑effective models for bulk workloads while reserving frontier models for high‑value tasks. Rapid adoption of new models (e.g., Astra) demonstrates that pricing pari…
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