Every LLM provider publishes a pricing table.$2.50 per million input tokens. $10 per million output tokens.` Clean. Transparent. Easy to spreadsheet.
So you run the napkin math: 10,000 requests/day × 2,000 input tokens × $2.50/M = $18.25/day on GPT-4o. Annualized: $6,660. The CFO approves it.
Three months later the bill is $54/day — $19,710/year — and nobody can explain the gap.
It's not a billing error. It's five structural leaks between the pricing page and your credit card.
The Five Leaks, at a Glance
