Cost Management
Know what you’re spending and where.
Cost Levers
Section titled “Cost Levers”Model Selection
Section titled “Model Selection”- Smaller models for simpler tasks
- Frontier models only when needed
- Routing logic to match task to model
Context Efficiency
Section titled “Context Efficiency”- Don’t send what you don’t need
- Compress/summarize long contexts
- Cache repeated context
Retry Reduction
Section titled “Retry Reduction”- Better prompts reduce retries
- Verification before generation
- Fail fast on bad inputs
Batching
Section titled “Batching”- Amortize overhead across requests
- Group similar tasks
Budgeting Approaches
Section titled “Budgeting Approaches”- Per-task limits: Cap tokens per operation
- Per-user limits: Fair allocation
- Per-project limits: Cost center tracking
- Alert thresholds: Catch runaway spend
Tracking
Section titled “Tracking”- Tag requests with project/user/task type
- Dashboard spend by dimension
- Compare cost vs. value delivered
Anti-patterns
Section titled “Anti-patterns”- Optimizing cost without measuring value (TTV)
- No visibility into spend breakdown
- Hard limits that break critical paths
- Ignoring cost until the bill arrives