Amazon engineers report 98% cost reduction after replacing Sonnet for ticket labeling

Amazon engineers replaced Claude Sonnet 4.6 with Strands Decider for internal ticket labeling, reporting a 98% cost reduction in a Strands Agents blog post. Their production estimates put the cost per million tickets at about $500, compared with about $22,200 for Sonnet, using published list prices. The replacement selects among fixed labels instead of generating text. Engineers ran both models on live traffic before switching, and reported that Decider outperformed Sonnet on a separate ticket set. Its 4,096-token window required shorter label descriptions and dropping the oldest comments from long tickets. The approach does not provide explanations for its choices.