How I Cut My LLM API Bills by 40% (And Built a Free Cost Calculator)

说明与用途

作者构建了LLM成本计算器和任务路由策略，将API账单降低了40%，并简化了多模型管理。

问题

Cost observability was a nightmare; monthly bills changed unpredictably due to varying pricing models across providers.

结果

Implemented cost calculator and routing strategy cut LLM API bills by ~40% and streamlined multi-model management.

工作流

• Build a frontend-only cost calculator to quantify token costs per model.
• Define a tiered routing strategy: Tier 1 for high-cost, high-intelligence tasks; Tier 2 for balanced tasks; Tier 3 for low-cost, high-speed tasks.
• Apply routing logic to direct 70% of agent calls to cheaper models, escalating to Claude only when confidence is low.
• Move to an API aggregator gateway to unify endpoints, handle failover, and simplify key management.

证据

Every time I tweaked the routing logic, my monthly bill changed in ways I couldn't predict.

来源

By routing the "dumb" tasks (which make up 70% of my agent's calls) to cheaper models, and only escalating to Claude when confidence is low, my bills dropped by nearly 40%.

来源

Using a unified endpoint means I just send one OpenAI-compatible request, and the gateway handles the routing and automatic failover.

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