Cutting OpenAI Costs From Scratch: What Nobody Tells You
Three months ago I sat down with my finance lead and watched her scroll through our OpenAI invoice. The number was $14,200 for the month. That was the moment I knew we had a problem. Not a "maybe we should optimize" problem — a real, existential, "this kills our margins before we hit Series B" problem.
I run a B2B SaaS platform that does a lot of LLM-powered document processing. Summarization, extraction, classification, the boring stuff that makes real money but burns tokens like crazy. We were routing everything through GPT-4o because, honestly, it was the path of least resistance when we started. Then the bills started arriving.
This is the story of how I cut our LLM spend by 97%, the architecture decisions that made it possible, and the things I wish someone had told me before I started.
The Math That Made Me Sweat
