Reducing LLM Costs: Best Practices and Techniques (opens in new tab)

LLM costs accumulate in ways that are not always obvious. Tokens consumed by system prompts, repeated context windows, and verbose JSON outputs all inflate bills before a single useful response is returned. For teams running agentic workflows or processing long documents, the standard token-based meter can turn a prototype into a budget risk. The good news is that cost optimization is a systems problem, not just a modeling problem. With the right architecture decisions, you can cut inference ...