Your LLM Bill Is 80% Waste. Here Are 7 Fixes.
You’re sending every question to your most expensive model. That’s like routing every patient to the head surgeon — stitches or heart transplant, same price. Seven levers, applied in order. Together: 80–95% cost reduction. Lever 1: Route by Difficulty 65% of queries don’t need your best model. A router classifies each query in <5ms using embeddings (mathematical fingerprints) — no AI call needed. ┌─────────┐ Query ──►│ Router │──► "What's our refund policy?" ──► Cheap model ($0.80/MTok) │ (<5ms) │──► "Design a caching layer" ──► Strong model ($15/MTok) └─────────┘ Category matching — compare query fingerprint to example phrases Keyword overrides — “OWASP” → always route to code review Complexity scoring — 5-line function → cheap; 200-line system → strong Watch your delegation cost. In agentic architectures, an orchestrator dispatches tasks to sub-agents. The orchestrator’s prompt to a sub-agent is output tokens for the orchestrator — 3–5x more expensive than input. A verbose 500-token delegation prompt costs the same as 1,500–2,500 input tokens. ...