You look at your provider dashboard and see one number: the total bill. It's like getting an electricity bill that just says "$5,000" with no breakdown of whether it was the AC, the fridge, or someone leaving the lights on all month. tbh, most AI startups are flying blind right now. We recently looked into the cost breakdown for several teams and found something crazy: almost 43% of LLM API spend is completely wasted. It’s not about paying for usage; it’s about paying for bad architecture. Here’s where the leaks are actually happening: Retry Storms (34% of waste) Your agent fails to parse a JSON response, so it retries. And retries. Sometimes 5-10 times in a loop. You aren't just paying for the failure, you are paying for the massive context window sent every single time. Duplicate Calls (85% of apps have this issue) Multiple users asking the exact same question, or internal systems running the same RAG pipeline on the same document.…