8 Practical Ways to Reduce Your LLM API Costs (With Real Numbers)

LLM API bills can spiral fast once you're in production. Here are eight concrete techniques that actually move the needle, ranked roughly by impact. 1. Cache repeated prompts If your app sends the same system prompt or common queries repeatedly, you're paying for the same computation over and over. Even a simple in-memory cache keyed on the exact prompt text can eliminate a meaningful chunk of spend — in our own usage data, repeated identical prompts accounted for a noticeable share...