Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What this guide gets you If you ship anything agentic, your LLM API bill has probably tripled in twelve months — not because prices rose, but because agents make far more calls than chatbots ever did. The good news: most of that spend is recoverable. Five levers, applied in the right order, routinely cut a production LLM bill by 70-85% without touching what the model actually produces. Caching is the biggest single win — cache hits can save up to roughly 90%, and Anthropic cached reads cost about 10% of the base input price. Batching is free money for any workload where the user is not waiting — a flat ~50% discount on Anthropic and OpenAI batch APIs. Model routing sends easy prompts to cheap models and reserves premium models for hard tasks, typically saving 40-70%. Context compaction…
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