Cut your LLM bill by 30 to 70%: the levers that work

On the bills I audit, the problem is almost never the price per token. It is useless context sent on every call and the most expensive model plugged in everywhere by default. Here is what I cut first. Why is my AI bill exploding when usage isn't going up? In nearly every engagement, the problem is not the price per token but the way the tokens are spent: useless context sent back on every call, the most expensive model used everywhere by default, answers regenerated when they already existed.…