Why Our LLM Bill Hit $31k Instead of $12k (The 4 Production Traps No Pricing Page Shows)

Our Q2 LLM infrastructure bill came in at $31k against a $12k budget. After reverse-engineering every line item, we found that naive token math (multiplying input + output tokens from a model pricing page) completely fails once you run multi-turn agentic loops in production. Here are the four traps that ate our runway, and what we built to model...