AI API bills scale with usage, and a feature that costs pennies in a demo can cost thousands at production volume. The good news is that most of that spend is recoverable without rewriting your product. This AI cost optimisation guide lists ten battle-tested tactics, each with a realistic saving range, and applies them to your own monthly figure so you can see the impact in pounds rather than abstract percentages.
How it works
Enter your current monthly spend, then switch on the tactics that fit your latency tolerance and workload. Each tactic carries a typical saving range and a one-line explanation of how and when to apply it. The tool compounds the selected savings multiplicatively — because real savings stack on the remaining bill, not the original — and applies a ceiling so the projection stays grounded. The result is a projected new monthly bill and a total saving estimate you can take into a planning conversation.
The tactics fall into a few families: reduce tokens (caching, compression, shorter system prompts), reduce price per token (model tiering, routing, batch processing), and reduce calls (deduplication, client-side guards, streaming-aware retries). Tactics within the same family overlap, which is exactly why naive percentage addition overstates the win — the compounding model corrects for that.
Tips and examples
Start with caching and model tiering. Caching repeated context such as long system prompts, retrieval documents, and few-shot examples is usually the biggest single lever, and most providers bill cached input at a steep discount. Model tiering — routing easy requests to a cheaper, faster model and reserving the frontier model for hard ones — is the second-biggest win and often improves latency at the same time.
Always pair a cost change with a quality gate. Before you ship prompt compression or a cheaper default model to production, run it against a fixed evaluation set and compare outputs. A change that saves forty percent but quietly degrades answers on ten percent of requests is rarely worth it. Measure first, then roll out behind a flag.