Model cost that looks negligible during a pilot can become a significant budget line once usage spreads. Fortunately, most of that cost can be managed through architectural decisions.
Architectural decisions that reduce cost
- Use a response cache for frequently repeated questions
- Route simple tasks to smaller, cheaper models
- Put only genuinely necessary passages into the context window
- Pre-summarise and store long documents
- Measure cost per use at the user level
Applied together, these decisions deliver considerable savings without compromising answer quality.