Your LLM feature costs $40k/month and is growing 30% monthly. Leadership wants it cut by 70% without hurting quality. What do you do?

Core Summary

Most LLM spend goes on tokens that never needed generating, requests that never needed a frontier model, and identical prefixes reprocessed on every call. Measure where the money actually goes first, then attack caching, routing and prompt size before anything as drastic as self-hosting.