Honestly, when I first checked my AI API bill last quarter, I almost choked. $420 a month. For what? A customer support chatbot that was mostly answering "what's your return policy?" and "where's my order?"
Here's the thing — I started digging into it, and what I found was kind of shocking. Most of that $420 was going to GPT-4o for tasks that a $0.01/M model could handle perfectly fine. I wasn't alone either. Pretty much every developer I talked to was overspending by 5-10x without even knowing it.
So I spent a weekend optimizing, and I got my bill down to $28/month. That's a 93% reduction. Here's exactly what I did.
The Biggest Lever: Model Selection
This is where basically all the savings come from. Check this out:
