EP008: The Hidden Costs of Using Multiple AI Providers

Most teams use multiple AI providers — GPT for chat, Claude for reasoning, DeepSeek for cheap summarization. Smart strategy, right? Not so fast. We break down the four hidden costs nobody talks about: integration overhead that costs $7,200/year in engineering time, billing chaos across three dashboards, failover logic that takes months to build, and inconsistent model behavior that multiplies your QA burden. Plus the one-line fix that eliminates all of them.