Field notes
Blog.
Field notes. AI, IT, DevOps, security. What we're learning, building, and watching.
IT
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace Now Cost the Same. Stop Shopping on Price.
Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Google Workspace Business Standard both run $14 a user a month in 2026. I walk through what that price parity actually means for a small business picking between them.
AI
Gartner's "Inference Paradox" Is Real. The Fix Isn't a New Budget Line.
Gartner says AI agent inference costs will rise more than fivefold by 2028 even as token prices keep falling. The warning is legitimate, but the proposed cure of centralized cost governance is the wrong first move.
AI
Stripe's $7 Billion Bet on the AI Router
Stripe just paid roughly 140 times revenue for a company that takes a 5 percent fee on AI traffic and marks up nothing. The deal says model routing is real infrastructure, and it also says the price got ahead of the business.
AI
Model Prices Fell 80 Percent. Most AI Software Bills Did Not Move.
OpenAI cut its API prices sharply again this summer, continuing a price war among model makers. A survey of 2,457 AI tools found only 5 percent are free and most charge the same as before. Here is why that is not a contradiction.
AI
A 27B Open Model That Runs on One GPU Just Shipped. The Benchmarks Are Still Alibaba's Homework.
Qwen3.8-27B claims coding and agent scores that rival much larger frontier models, and it is small enough to own outright on a single consumer GPU. Here is what is confirmed, what is still just a vendor's own number, and why that gap is the actual story.
Software
Custom Software vs Paying for SaaS Forever, Run the Actual Math
Microsoft just raised Business Basic prices 17 percent and Salesforce raised its own twice in two years. Here is the breakeven math for when building your own tool beats renting one indefinitely.
AI
DeepSeek Raised Prices Up to 12x. The Number That Matters Is Smaller.
DeepSeek, the model that started the AI price war, just hiked its own API rates by as much as 1,100 percent. The fine print on when those rates apply changes the story for a business running work during normal hours.
AI
Congress Wants Chinese AI Models Out of Government. Watch Where That Line Moves Next.
A bipartisan bill would bar federal agencies from using Chinese AI models just as US companies are routing a growing share of their workloads to those same models because they cost a fraction of the alternative.
AI
Anthropic Froze Sonnet 5's Price. Your Actual Bill Did Not Get the Memo.
Anthropic canceled a planned 50 percent price hike on Claude Sonnet 5 today, and competition is the reason. But a separate analysis shows the model's real cost per task already rose without any list price changing at all.
AI
Do You Actually Need AI Automation? Ask These Three Questions First
Census data shows most small businesses still are not running AI in production, even as survey headlines claim near universal adoption. Here is how to tell if you are behind, or just behind the hype.
AI
Brussels Enforced the Cheap Half of Its AI Law and Delayed the Expensive Half
On August 2 the EU began enforcing AI Act transparency rules while pushing the costlier high risk requirements back more than a year, after founders reported spending a third of their budgets on compliance.
Business
Rippling was burning 40 percent of its engineering budget on AI tokens. It fixed that without cutting anyone off.
Rippling's CFO found the company on pace to spend 40 percent of its R&D headcount budget on AI tokens, growing 80 percent a month. The fix was not a budget cap, it was a router, and the math behind it is worth copying.
AI
The price of AI just fell off a cliff. That is the best news your business got this summer.
OpenAI cut prices up to 80 percent and open-weight models are the reason. Here is what a business should actually do about it, and why competition, not regulation, is driving the cost down.
AI
Microsoft is spending $2.5 billion because most AI projects fail. That should tell you something.
Microsoft's new Frontier Company embeds engineers inside businesses to deploy AI. The number underneath it, that most AI pilots go nowhere, matters more than the press release.
Security
A vendor says 88 percent of companies had an AI agent security incident. The vendor sells the fix. It is still true.
The scary agent-security stat comes from a company that profits from fear, so I checked it against sources that do not. The risk holds up, and the causes are boring.
Software
Gartner says AI agents put $234 billion in software spending at risk. Read the fine print before you cancel anything.
The $234 billion headline is real, but Gartner also predicts 40 percent of agentic projects get canceled by 2027 and calls most agents fake. Here is the honest read for a business that pays for SaaS.
Business
The AI Gold Rush Has a Customer Problem. You Are Not Invited.
OpenAI and Anthropic just committed billions to deploying AI inside large enterprises and PE portfolios. Here is why that is the best news Florida SMBs got this year.
General
Welcome to the Mojo AI Services blog.
Field notes from a founder-led South Florida technology partner. AI, managed IT, custom development, DevOps, and security, in plain English.
Tell us what's on your mind.
You don't need a polished brief to reach out. A two-line email about what's bugging you is plenty; we'll tell you straight if we're the right fit, and what we'd tackle first.
We'll scope the work around your workflow, goals, and timeline before quoting anything, so you know what's included before committing.