My AI integration had terrible costs until I changed my approach

The problem: I loved AI summaries until I got the bill Last month I was working on a SaaS product that needed to summarize long articles for users. Think of it like a TL;DR generator. I built a first prototype using GPT-4 with a straightforward prompt: "Summarize this article in 3 bullet points." It worked beautifully. The summaries were crisp, accurate, and users loved them. Then the API bills arrived. One month of moderate usage cost me over $1,200. That's not sustainable for a side project...