Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Most teams building on LLM APIs discover the same uncomfortable truth around the time their product starts getting real usage: the cost curve is not flat. Every user who asks a question incurs an API call. Every API call burns tokens. At 10 users, the bill is negligible. At 10,000 users, it is a spreadsheet item. At 100,000 users, it is a board discussion. What surprises most teams is not that costs scale — of course they do — but that a significant fraction of those API calls are asking questions that have already been answered. The same support question, slightly reworded. The same code pattern, in a different file. The same onboarding query, from the forty-seventh new user. Every one of those is a full API round trip with the cost and latency of a fresh generation, when the answer…