I've seen teams burn through their entire AI budget in weeks. Not because they built the wrong thing. Because they never looked at how each request flows through their pipeline.
That's the hidden cost of AI agents. It's not the API pricing page. It's the architecture decisions you make before you ship.
Here's what I've learned running production LLM pipelines that process 10,000+ jobs daily, and how to fix the leaks before they drain your budget.
The Three Cost Leaks Nobody Talks About
Most teams focus on the wrong thing. They obsess over per-token pricing when the real money bleeds from three structural problems.
