The $0 Bug That Cost Us $1,800 in API Calls (opens in new tab)

Last quarter our OpenAI bill went from $620 to $2,480 in 23 days. No new features shipped. No traffic spike. Zero error alerts. Deployment logs were clean. Just a number climbing in silence while five engineers stared at dashboards that gave us totals and nothing else. This is what we found. And why "cost monitoring" is completely the wrong mental model. The dashboard that answers the wrong question First thing I did was open the OpenAI usage dashboard. It showed me a total. A graph going up....