Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
For most of 2023 and 2024, the dominant concern for AI product builders was not features — it was the bill. A conversational product running GPT-4 class inference at meaningful scale could easily spend $50,000 a month on tokens before the product reached profitability. That reality shaped an entire generation of product decisions: shorter system prompts, aggressive caching, hybrid retrieval to avoid long contexts, and the constant hunt for cheaper model tiers. That era is ending faster than most people realise. AI inference costs are falling at approximately 95% per year — a widely cited industry estimate based on tracked per-token price reductions across major providers since GPT-4's original pricing. Compounded over two years, workloads that cost $1 in mid-2024 now cost roughly $0.05.…
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