How I stopped burning money on AI API calls (and got faster responses) (opens in new tab)

I love building with AI. But my credit card? Not so much. A few months ago, I was working on a customer support bot for a side project. It was supposed to answer FAQs, escalate complex issues, and generally make life easier. I hooked it up to GPT-4, wrote some decent prompts, and everything worked — until the bill arrived. $200 in one week. That’s when I realized: raw API calls are a cash bonfire. Every conversation, every retry, every hallucinated follow-up — all burning money. I needed a di...