How to Reduce AI Inference Costs: 5 Strategies That Work

Five practical ways to shrink your AI bill without sacrificing agent quality, from prompt caching and model routing to smarter retrieval and self-hosted small models.

You’ve finally finished the agent. The demo cost almost nothing to run, so you shipped it. Then the first month of real traffic arrives, along with an invoice that looks suspiciously like a mortgage payment.

This side of AI engineering gets far less attention than it should. We talk a lot about model quality, latency, and evals. The actual line items on …