The Real Cost of Running AI in Production: How to Cut Your LLM Bills by 60 to 90 Percent

I remember the exact moment I realized I had a problem. Three weeks into shipping my first AI feature in production, nothing fancy, a document summarization tool built on Claude's API. Maybe 200 users at that point. I opened the billing dashboard on a Tuesday morning and saw a number that made me close the laptop and walk around my apartment for five minutes. Four hundred and seventy dollars. In three weeks. From 200 users. I had done the math before launch and estimated around sixty dollars...