7 Levers That Cut Our LLM Costs by 80%
Most teams send every question to their most expensive model. That’s like routing every patient to the head surgeon — stitches or heart transplant, same price. When we audited query logs across several production workloads, we found a consistent pattern: 60–70% of queries were simple lookups or classifications that a cheap model handled just as well. The expensive model was doing busywork. Seven levers, applied in order. Together they drove 80–95% cost reduction in our case — your mileage will vary by workload. ...