Most teams I talk to run every LLM call through one frontier model, then act surprised when the invoice shows up. We did the same thing for a while. The fix that actually moved our bill was boring: route each request to the cheapest model that can still do the job. Here is the math and how we set it up. The price spread is bigger than people assume If you line up current API pricing across providers, the gap between budget and frontier models for comparable output is roughly 50x...