The provider dashboards show you one number — your total bill. That's like getting an electricity bill with no breakdown. You just see the total and hope nobody left the AC on. Tbh, if you look closely at your API logs, you are probably wasting around 43% of your budget. I spent the last few weeks analyzing LLM usage across different teams, and the same leaks happen everywhere. Here is where your money is actually going: 1. Retry Storms (34% of waste) Your prompt fails to return valid JSON. The agent retries. It fails again. Next thing you know, your while-loop has fired 40 times. At 10k tokens a pop on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that single user interaction just cost you a lot. 2. Duplicate Calls Users ask the same questions. Without semantic caching, you are paying OpenAI to generate the exact same answer 100 times a day. 3. Context Bloat Sending the entire chat history in every single request without truncation. You only need the last few turns, but your wrapper is sending 50k tokens "just in case." 4.…