Cost Optimization

    Model routing, caching, batching, budget control for AI systems

    AI Cost Optimization: A Practitioner Framework

    By Sebastian Chedal

    An AI system that’s starting to cost real money is a different problem from an AI prototype, whose job was to prove a model could do the thing. The production system’s job is to do the thing at a margin that justifies its existence. Teams usually cross that line without noticing. The bill climbs steadily,…

    The Four Axes of AI Agent Efficiency: When to Use LLMs (And When Not To)

    By Sebastian Chedal

    What You Ask the Model to Do Matters More Than Which Model You Use Most advice about AI agent costs starts and ends with tokens. Cache your prompts. Batch your requests. Use a cheaper model. And those tactics help, the same way compressing images helps a slow website. They’re optimizations at the wrong layer. The…

    The Cost Circuit Breaker: How We Prevent Runaway Spending Across 9 AI Agents

    By Sebastian Chedal

    The $47,000 Problem (And Why Rate Limits Won’t Save You) A LangChain agent running in a retry loop accumulated $47,000 in API charges over 11 days. A developer on Reddit’s r/AI_Agents shared their $30,000 agent loop. A smaller but telling example: the team behind Askew’s circuit breaker post burned $87 on failed requests before they…

    AI Agent ROI Calculator: Is an Autonomous Agent Worth It for Your Business?

    By Sebastian Chedal

    Autonomous AI agents handle real business tasks, from research and scheduling to software development and customer support. But how much would one actually cost compared to hiring someone new for the role? This calculator estimates the monthly cost of running a managed AI agent. You pay your own API costs directly to your AI provider,…

    AI Chatbot ROI Calculator: Estimate Your Savings in 2 Minutes (2026)

    By Sebastian Chedal

    AI chatbots increase sales by an average of 67% across implementations. But the bottom 20% of implementations see no improvement at all, and some actually decrease conversions by 12%. The difference is almost entirely in how the chatbot is built and what it is asked to do. This calculator helps you estimate the realistic revenue…

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