llm cost teardown
Cut your LLM bill with six levers — without lowering output quality.
A one-week teardown of where your LLM spend actually goes, which of six levers move it, and how much each is worth against your own traffic and quality bar — no guesswork, no quality regressions.
Fixed-scope audits · Read-only by default · NDA on request · US/UK/EU remote
What you get
Spend map
Your LLM cost broken down by service, model, and route, so the expensive paths stop hiding inside one monthly total.
Per-lever opportunity assessment
Each of the six levers modeled against your actual traffic — what it would save you, not a headline number from someone else’s workload.
Quality-guardrail plan
The evals and checks that keep output quality fixed while cost comes down, so savings don’t quietly cost you accuracy.
Routing & caching recommendations
Concrete model-routing and semantic-caching changes, sequenced by savings-per-effort.
Prioritized savings roadmap
A ranked plan you can hand to your team — highest-impact, lowest-risk levers first.
Readout call
A live walkthrough of the findings and roadmap, plus the written teardown.
The six levers
Public benchmarks put each lever’s savings in a broad range — but the only number that matters is yours, so I model each one against your real traffic and quality bar instead of quoting a headline percentage.
1 · Model routing
Send each call to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar for that step; reserve frontier models for the hard hops.
2 · Semantic caching
Cache on meaning, not exact strings, so near-duplicate requests never hit the model twice.
3 · Prompt compression
Trim system prompts, context, and few-shot bloat that silently inflate every single call.
4 · Batch / async pricing
Move latency-tolerant work onto batch and async tiers that price well below interactive rates.
5 · Provider arbitrage
Price the same capability across providers and route by current cost, not by habit.
6 · Fallback chains
Degrade gracefully to cheaper providers on error or overload instead of paying a premium to retry.
Worked example — my own platform
The same levers, run on my own agent platform. A small bill — but the mechanics are identical, and they scale with spend.
Multi-model routing plus caching did most of the work: cheap models for the easy hops, cached results for the repeats, and frontier models only where quality demanded them — with no drop in output quality. On a larger bill, the same moves free up real budget.
Timeline
- 01
Phase 0 — Instrument spend
Days 1–2Read-only access to billing and logs; build the spend map by service, model, and route.
- 02
Phase 1 — Model the levers
Days 3–4Estimate each lever against your real traffic and define the quality guardrails that protect output.
- 03
Phase 2 — Roadmap & readout
Day 5Deliver the prioritized savings roadmap and walk through it live.
Who it’s for
- Your monthly LLM bill is large enough that a week of engineering pays for itself.
- You need savings that don’t come at the cost of output quality.
- You want a concrete roadmap, not a vendor pitch.
- Your spend is trivial and not worth optimizing yet.
- You want someone to implement every change for you this week — the teardown is analysis and a roadmap.
- You’re unwilling to define a quality bar to protect.
FAQ
- Will cutting cost hurt quality?
- No — that’s the whole point of doing it as engineering rather than blunt downgrades. Every lever is modeled against a quality bar you define, and the guardrail plan keeps output fixed while cost moves.
- How much can I actually save?
- It depends entirely on your traffic mix, so I won’t quote a made-up percentage. Published ranges for these levers are wide; the teardown replaces them with a number modeled on your own usage. See the own-platform example above for how the levers compound.
- What access do you need?
- Read-only: your billing/usage export and enough logs or traces to see the cost distribution across models and routes.
- What’s the deliverable?
- A written teardown — spend map, per-lever assessment, quality-guardrail plan, and a prioritized roadmap — plus a live readout.
Ready to start?
Book a 30-minute systems call and we’ll confirm scope and timing.