cost

What LLM features cost at volume, and how to cut the bill without quietly paying for it in quality.

2 posts

• Cutting LLM costs without cutting quality

  4 August 2026 · 5 min read

  Four levers ranked by effort, and the statistical point that decides it: you are not asking whether the cheap model is better, you are asking whether it is worse by less than you will trade for the money. That is a non-inferiority test.

  • cost
  • A/B testing
  • production

• Prompt caching: the discount most teams leave on the table

  22 July 2026 · 5 min read

  The cache breaks at the first token that differs, and everything below it is recomputed at full price — so one timestamp near the top of a 3,000-token system prompt voids the whole discount. Order by volatility, and track hit rate per variant.

  • cost
  • latency
  • production