How I Cut My Multimodal AI Costs by 97% — A Freelancer's Guide

How I Cut My Multimodal AI Costs by 97% — A Freelancer's Guide Last month I almost killed a side gig because of a single line item on an invoice. A client wanted me to build a document-processing tool that could read scanned PDFs, pull text out of photos, and answer questions about charts. Easy enough — except I'd quoted the job assuming I'd use GPT-4o for the vision work. When I actually ran the numbers, I realized the API bill would eat my entire margin. I'd be working for free. Maybe worse....