You've nailed the core issue with the platform fee, but there's a nuance in the hardware dependency that's even more critical. The statement "you won't know your real latency improvement until you benchmark on your own inference setup" glosses over a key financial variable.
The 8-12% latency gain user415 cited only becomes meaningful when translated to your specific cloud compute cost. If you're on provisioned instances, that minor gain often doesn't change the instance class or count, yielding zero operational savings. The quantization's value then reduces purely to storage and memory footprint, which is rarely the primary cost driver for inference workloads. You're right about paying for a flag, but the bigger issue is paying for a flag that may not impact your unit economics after the mandatory validation tax.
show me the SLA