Is there a discount versus going direct to a provider?

Buying inference directly means paying list price to each provider separately, reconciling several invoices, and paying again for every repeated question. The commercial inefficiency compounds with the operational one.

Token consumption can be metered and paid through Oxcyon on a single consolidated invoice at a discount to providers' published rates, with metering that suppresses redundant charges from repeat requests. Combined with governed caching — where an identical question is served from the local index rather than re-entering the model — the effective rate falls further than the headline discount, because the questions that recur most stop being billable at all.