DEV Community

Nick Vas
Nick Vas

Posted on

Why Your LLM Serving Costs Are 3X Higher Than They Should Be

Your LLM token bill just exploded 3X. Again.

You’re not alone. I’ve watched teams burn through $50k/month on LLM inference costs that could’ve been $15k, if they’d known these 5 strategies.

The brutal truth? Most of your token spend is waste. You’re:

Shipping entire codebases when you need 3 functions

Paying to remind the LLM of its job 1,000+ times daily

Running LLMs for tasks a regex could handle in milliseconds

After optimizing production LLM systems and working with teams in the field, I’ve identified the exact patterns that slash costs without cutting features.

The 5 strategies that cut our costs by 60%:

  • ⚡ Targeted context retrieval (dependency graphs > full docs)
  • 🎯 System prompt optimization (38% token reduction)
  • 🧪 A/B testing prompts like code
  • 💾 Smart caching + batching (avoid my serverless disaster)
  • 🔍 Ruthless LLM necessity audits

Read the full breakdown with step-by-step implementation guides →

If you’re shipping production AI, this will save you thousands. Possibly tens of thousands.

Top comments (0)