LLM costs accumulate in ways that are not always obvious. Tokens consumed by system prompts, repeated context windows, and verbose JSON outputs all inflate bills before a single useful response is returned. For teams running agentic workflows or processing long documents, the standard token-based meter can turn a prototype into a budget risk. The good news is that cost optimization is a systems problem, not just a modeling problem. With the right architecture decisions, you can cut inference spe...