How I Cut LLM Costs in Half — A Backend Engineer's 2026 Guide (opens in new tab)

How I Cut LLM Costs in Half — A Backend Engineer's 2026 Guide I'll be honest with you: I never wanted to become the person who obsesses over token pricing. I built backends, wired up message queues, tuned Postgres indices, and occasionally yelled at Docker. LLM integration was supposed to be just another HTTP call. Then the bill arrived. About six months ago, my team stood up a customer-facing summarization feature. Nothing exotic — ingest a long document, spit back a concise summary, let use...