How I Cut My LLM Costs by 80% Without Sacrificing Quality.
SECTION 1 — From $847 to $159 a Month. The Bill That Made Me Stop Everything I still remember the exact moment. It was a Tuesday morning. I opened my OpenAI billing dashboard expecting the usual maybe $150, $200 tops. Instead I saw $847.32 staring back at me. For one month. For a side project with maybe 200 active users. I sat there for a full minute just staring at it. No image generation. No fine-tuning. No wild experiments. Just a standard RAG pipeline […]