Developers are spreading their work across more models from more labs, and more of that work is running on models teams host themselves. Data published this week from OpenRouter, our own usage dashboard, and a talk by Revolut's AI ops lead all point the same way. The single-model setup is fading, and the default model is increasingly one you can run on your own hardware.

Teams now run a portfolio of models

OpenRouter reported on November 2 that customers spending $100 or more a month now use a median of 6 model families, which is double the figure from a year ago. The top 10% of those customers went from 7 to 14. For a while, the trend ran the other way: the count fell through the first half of 2025 and bottomed at 3.8 in June, then climbed every quarter to 7.3 in October 2026; the highest OpenRouter has measured.

The heavier the usage, the wider the spread. In October, the median customer spending $100 to $1K a month used 5 labs, those spending $1K to $10K used 8, and those above $10K used 12.…