In my last post, we talked about key cache invalidation — the silent production killer that turns your gateway into a 502 factory. Today I want to talk about something equally dangerous but far more insidious: cost traps.
These aren't bugs. They're not crashes. Your gateway runs fine. Your users are happy. Then finance sends you a Slack message: "Why did our OpenAI bill jump 4x last month?"
I've been running LiteLLM Proxy in production for multiple teams across three companies. Here are the five cost traps I've personally been burned by — each with the config that would have saved me thousands of dollars.
Trap #1: The Retry Spiral — When num_retries=3 Actually Means 15
The Problem
