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mediumAI Engineering

How do you estimate and control LLM costs in production?

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01

Understand the problem

Token math, the levers that actually move the bill, and per-feature cost accounting.

costtokensoptimizationllmops
02

Attempt it yourself

Sketch your approach before reading the solution — that's what interviews test.

Nudge consolestandby

Stuck? Beam a request up — the console returns a conceptual nudge that guides your logic without spoiling the implementation.

03

Study the solution

Cost = input tokens x input rate + output tokens x output rate, summed over calls — so estimate by modelling tokens per request and requests per day, remembering that agent loops multiply calls and re-send growing context each turn. The big levers, in rough order: route easy tasks to smaller models, prompt caching for

Solution ready — 2 min read

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04

Read the code

Per-request cost metering
const res = await client.messages.create(reqArgs);

const u = res.usage;   // input_tokens, output_tokens, cache_read_input_tokens...
await metrics.record({
  feature: "support-triage",
  tenant: ctx.tenantId,
  model: reqArgs.model,
  inputTokens: u.input_tokens,
  cachedTokens: u.cache_read_input_tokens ?? 0,
  outputTokens: u.output_tokens,
  usd: price(reqArgs.model, u),
});
// alerts: tenant > daily ceiling, feature > weekly budget, cache-hit-rate < 60%
05

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