Cutting LLM costs without sacrificing quality
NEO Campus Editorial1 February 20266 min read
LLM bills surprise more finance teams than any other infrastructure line item. Most of the cost is avoidable with disciplined engineering.
Route by difficulty
Send easy queries to a small model and only escalate when needed. A 90/10 split often cuts costs in half.
Cache aggressively
Many queries are repeated or near-duplicates. Semantic caching pays for itself quickly.
Prompt diet
Trim system prompts, remove unused tools, and shrink few-shot examples. Tokens add up.
