How We Reduced Our LLM API Costs by 60%: What Actually Worked

At some point in most of our production AI projects, someone looks at the monthly API bill and asks whether we can do something about it. The answer is always yes — but the specific answers vary a lot depending on what you are actually spending the money on.

This post covers the techniques that moved the needle for us, in rough order of impact. Some of these are obvious in retrospect. A few took longer than they should have to figure out.

Where the money actually goes

Before optimising anything, you need to know what is driving your costs. LLM API pricing is based on for businesses — RAG pipelines, AI agents, LLM integrations, and custom AI applications built for scale and reliability. Get in touch if you want to talk through your use case.