Resources / Guide · 8 min read
Cutting Your AI Bill in Half Without Losing Quality
Real tactics — model routing, caching, batching, and prompt surgery — that ship 50%+ cost savings.
Route by difficulty
Send 80% of traffic to a small fast model. Detect hard cases (low confidence, long input, specific intents) and escalate to the frontier model. Easy 50% savings.
Cache aggressively
Prompt caching on the provider side is free money for any workflow with a stable system prompt. Embedding caches save 30-90% on RAG ingest.
Trim the prompt
Most prompts are 2x longer than they need to be. Move static instructions to a system message that gets cached. Strip examples once the model is reliable. Measure before and after.
Batch what you can
Provider batch APIs cost half as much for non-urgent work. Use them for backfills, embeddings, and any async generation.
Watch the output tokens
Output is 3-5x the cost of input. Constrain output length. Use structured output when you can. Stop letting the model "explain its reasoning" in production.
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