Why Sonnet, not Opus.

We get asked why LADLE doesn't run on Opus. Fair question — Opus is Anthropic's largest and most capable model, and if you're paying for AI, "the biggest one" is the intuitive answer. Here's why we don't.

Opus costs roughly 5× more per token than Sonnet. At LADLE's average subscriber usage (~800K tokens/month), Opus inference would cost us around $32-38/month per subscriber versus Sonnet's $6-7. Building a $20 product around $32 of variable cost isn't a product; it's a subsidy that runs out.

The path most vendors take is to charge more for Opus access. Anthropic itself does — Claude Pro is $20/month for Sonnet with limits; Max is $100-200/month for higher Opus access. That's honest pricing. It's just a different product than what LADLE is trying to be.

For LADLE, the constraint is: the meal donation has to be at least $8. Ops has to be paid. That leaves ~$7 for inference. That budget lines up with Sonnet. It doesn't line up with Opus.

The second question we get is whether Sonnet is enough. The blunt answer: for what most people ask an AI assistant to do, yes. Drafting emails, summarizing documents, code review on typical PRs, writing help, research assistance, meeting notes, brainstorming — Sonnet handles these at a level that's indistinguishable from Opus for most tasks. Anthropic's own model comparisons back this up; the gap between Sonnet and Opus shows up on the hardest reasoning benchmarks and long complex agentic workflows, not on everyday assistant tasks.

Where Opus genuinely pulls ahead: - Multi-step reasoning on hard math, physics, or complex logic problems - Agentic workflows that chain many tool uses across long horizons - Some code tasks on very large codebases

For those tasks, if you need them daily, the honest recommendation is Claude Max ($100-200/month) directly through Anthropic. It's the right tool for that job. LADLE isn't the right tool for that job, and pretending it is with a $20 price would be dishonest — either the meals suffer, or the inference budget is unrealistic and the service degrades.

There's a subtler thing here. LADLE's design bias is that the model should be quiet and helpful, not the smartest possible entity you have access to. The frontier model race is a fun engineering story. It's not what we're trying to sell. We're selling a competent daily assistant, powered by a well-known model, with a specific and unusual social contract attached. Sonnet is exactly the right tier for that pitch.

If Anthropic ships a Sonnet successor that gets materially cheaper, we'll pass the room through — usually as more headroom for heavy users, occasionally as new features. If they ever ship an Opus-tier model at Sonnet-tier prices, we'll switch. Until then, Sonnet is the answer, and it's the honest answer.