Many users are shocked when they see their yearly LLM spending. Most of it is avoidable.

What helped me control costs: • Choose a cheap default model for routine tasks. Use premium models only when needed. This alone can cut 30%+. • Build a personal prompt library. Store your best prompts for recurring tasks. It saves retries and tokens. • Set hard usage limits. Track daily or weekly spend and enable billing alerts. • Invest in documentation and structured context. Good data reduces prompt size and improves output quality. • Cache and reuse AI outputs whenever possible. • Track cost per feature, not just total spend.

Treat LLMs like infrastructure. Without discipline, costs will grow silently.