Silent re-pricing, alias re-routing, tokenizer drift and expiring intro prices don't throw a single error — they just change your invoice. The Drift Audit reads your last 90 days of provider usage exports and shows you exactly what moved, and what it cost you.
Early access — we onboard in waves. No endpoint change, read-only on your usage exports.
We onboard in waves. Leave your email and we'll reach out with the next batch — first audits are free either way.
All four happened in the last 14 months. Provider deprecation emails cover none of them — those announce retirements, with notice, to the account owner. Drift is what happens without an announcement.
In May 2026, xAI retired eight model slugs but kept them resolving — requests to grok-code-fast-1 silently routed to a flagship model at flagship prices. No 404, no deprecation error. The bill and the output quality both changed overnight.
Gemini 2.5 Flash left preview with its output rate moving from $0.60 to $2.50 per million — a 4× change under an unchanged model name. Teams that budgeted on preview pricing found out on the invoice.
Claude's tokenizer from 4.7 onward produces roughly 30% more tokens for the same text. Headline per-token prices never moved — the bill did. No price page will ever show you this one.
Claude Sonnet 5 runs at $2/$10 introductory pricing until 31 August 2026, then becomes $3/$15 — a +50% step most teams haven't calendared. Dated price events like this are exactly what monitoring is for.
Those emails announce scheduled retirements, with 60 days to 12 months of notice — and they go to the account owner, not the engineer who owns the integration. None of the four drift patterns above comes with an email, because none of them is a retirement.
No. The audit is read-only on usage exports you already have. Teams that route through VerticalAPI's gateway get the same detection continuously, per request — but the audit requires no integration at all.
Drift is recurring: new GA re-pricings, new aliases, the next tokenizer change, the next intro price with an expiry date. Monitoring watches your model mix against the registry and alerts you before the invoice does.