For the mechanical stages (scanning, scoring, dedup) — indistinguishable from proprietary models. These are structured tasks: "score this post 1-10 against these criteria" or "extract these fields from this text." An 8B model handles that fine at 30 tok/s on consumer GPU.

For synthesis and judgment — no, it's not close. That's exactly why I route those stages to Claude. When you need the model to generate novel connections or strategic recommendations, the quality gap between 8B and frontier is real.

The key insight is that most pipeline stages don't need synthesis. They need pattern matching. And that's where the 95% cost savings live.