The #1 goal for Anthropic and others is to take the longest running process possible and make it entirely opaque to the developer. It's the only way they can build a moat for a commodity. I would highly recommend building your own multi-stage orchestration flows because then you'll get a much better idea of where you need to be in the loop, and where you can save money. Once entire organisations are functioning only as extensions of Anthropic, they'll put the prices up and squeeze the shit out of the market.