Here's why:
A RAG app sending 4,000-token input payloads per query —80 to 90% of that bill comes from context written once and repeated on every call.
One startup CTO opened his cloud bill: $2,847 for one month.
"If we're burning this much before product-market fit, we'll never make it to Series A."
He fixed it in a weekend.
Nearly three-quarters of enterprises watched their AI costs blow past budget last year.
(2026 State of FinOps Report)
Token prices are not the problem.
80-90% of your input bill is repeated context — system prompts,
retrieved documents, tool schemas —re-billed on every single call.
Provider-level caching eliminates this layer entirely.
Most teams aren't triggering it correctly.
Built TokenVault AI to fix exactly this — automatically.
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