Exactly, imo it’s not even that cheap if you look into perspective and consider the fact that providers could subsidize the cost of cached input tokens to virtually zero if they would allow for a more flexible API (e.g. tree of message blocks instead of chain). Most of the cost is the infrastructure around keeping KV caches, estimating their lifetimes, etc. When mist people just want to run one context block with multiple subsequent variants of a second block in parallel. I still stand by my statement.

With this cost, does it perform the same quality and speed as Jev?

I'm quite interested in this; my current understanding is though that Jev is great when scored with response quality and latency metrics.