Honestly, bootcamp Grad Dives Into Google vs OpenAI API Pricing
When I finished my coding bootcamp three months ago, I thought I understood what an API did. I mean, you send a request, you get a response back, right? What I did not understand was how dramatically the cost could vary depending on which model you picked. I had no idea that a single line of code change could mean the difference between paying pennies and paying hundreds of dollars at scale.
That is the rabbit hole I fell down last week, and I want to walk you through everything I learned. This is the post I wish I had read before I burned through my first $50 in API credits.
Why I Started Looking At Pricing In The First Place
I was building a small app that takes user reviews and summarizes them. Pretty straightforward. I figured I would just plug in the most popular model and call it a day. That model, if you have been paying attention to the news, is GPT-4o. So I wired it up, ran a few tests, and everything looked great.
