Batch APIs — the 50% Discount as Industry Standard

Every major provider ships an async batch API with a 50% discount and ~24-hour turnaround. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and most of the inference platforms (Fireworks batch tier, Together batch) implement the same pattern. Stack batch with prompt caching and overnight pipelines drop to ~10% of synchronous-uncached cost. The rule is brutally simple: if it is not interactive, it belongs on batch. Content generation pipelines, document classification, data extraction, report generation, bulk labeling, catalog tagging — anything tolerant of 24-hour latency is money left on the table until it moves to batch. The 2026 production pattern is to triage every new LLM workload into three lanes: interactive (synchronous with caching), semi-interactive (async queue with fallback), batch (overnight, cached input stacked). Workloads that pretend to be interactive but tolerate minutes of latency waste most.