Your LLM Judge Costs More Than the Agent. Gate It in 40 Lines. (opens in new tab)

LLM judge cost is the share of your eval bill spent grading agent output instead of producing it. To control it, run a 40-line offline pre-gate that triages every span with four deterministic rules and escalates only the uncertain tail to the expensive judge. On one trace this cut judge cost share from 50% to 16%. LLM judge cost is the line item nobody puts on the FinOps dashboard. You add an LLM-as-judge to grade every agent span, you sleep better, and three weeks later the eval layer is qui...