Seat subscriptions and metered clouds will keep rising. The leverage is a lab you own — customize the harness, keep the data, and pay a provider only for the tokens you actually burn.
Cost is the receipt. Control is the architecture. Read how Bastion keeps the loop.
Control stays on disk
Repos, traces, and evals do not leave the building unless you choose a provider call.
Harness free, tokens optional
Four loops stay on disk. Bastion tools run locally at no seat cost. Attach Nebius, Ollama, or any compatible API when you need inference.
Same loop when you scale
Start on a laptop. When you need more metal, keep the workflow — do not rewrite the lab for a new cloud.
Pay for tokens. Not for the lab.
A sketch of subscription drag versus a local harness plus metered inference.
What actually stays local
Source, traces, eval artifacts, and the graph Sequence draws. Provider calls are opt-in and scoped to the tokens you choose to burn.
When tokens enter the loop
Attach Nebius Token Factory, Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The harness does not change when the model does.
Scaling without a rewrite
The same planes — machine, systems, models, memory, infra — hold when you add metal. You are not migrating a rented workspace.