Towards Data Science By Pratik R

We Built a Routing Layer to Cut Our AI Costs. It Broke the Product.

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A team cut their AI inference bill by more than half. Three months later, customer satisfaction was dropping and the cost savings were tied to the quality loss.

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Towards Data Science
May 29

RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost—and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circuit breaking, achieving an 85% reduction in LLM costs without sacrificing answer quality.

By Emmimal P Alexander