16/10/2026
When the AI bill grows faster than usage, the cause is usually where the tokens go, not what they cost.
In most stacks we look at, the bulk of tokens goes to simple work: summaries, extraction, tagging. Yet all of it runs on the most expensive model, because that’s what the first prototype used.
Two things change the game:
Match the model to the task. Send simple work to a fast model and keep the frontier model for real reasoning. Depending on the traffic mix, routing cuts inference cost by 30–80%.
Stop paying twice. Cache prompts you send again and again, and batch the work that can wait. Neither needs a single product change.
Pay for the model the task needs, not the one you happened to start with.
Do you know what share of your tokens actually needs your biggest model?