AI Cost Tracking — How to Stop Bleeding on LLM Bills

One PoC: $50/month. Production for 10K users: $15K/month. Without cost management, AI budgets explode.

Where the Money Goes¶

• Redundant context: 80% irrelevant tokens in RAG
• Unnecessary GPT-4: 70% of requests can be handled by a cheaper model
• Retry storms: Failed requests without backoff
• Dev waste: Testing on production models

Optimization¶

Model routing: A classifier decides the tier — 40–60% savings. Prompt optimization: Shorter = cheaper. Semantic cache: Similar queries → cached response. Batching: Where you don’t need real-time.

Dashboard¶

Cost per request, per user, per feature, per model. Alert on anomalies (+50% over baseline).

AI FinOps Is a New Discipline¶

Track costs from day one. Model routing and semantic caching are quick wins.