Most people think building an AI SaaS is as simple as wrapping an API.
It’s not — it’s a cost marathon disguised as innovation.
Once you hit production, every token burns cash — inputs, outputs, retries, all of it.
Self-hosting? Sounds great until you factor in GPUs, orchestration, and uptime.
Profit only comes when you engineer smartly:
– Compress context instead of sending everything
– Control output verbosity
– Route models by use case
– Know your user-level unit economics cold
AI SaaS isn’t about prompts. It’s about precision, efficiency, and survival at scale.
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