Dev Tools · 1h ago
How One Startup Slashed AI API Costs by 95%
A startup cut its monthly AI API bill from $11,000 to under $400 by routing tasks to cheaper models. They replaced GPT-4o with DeepSeek and Qwen models for simple tasks like chat and classification. The key was a task-to-model mapping table that matched complexity to cost.
Meridian48 take
The savings are impressive, but the real lesson is that many teams default to expensive models out of convenience, not necessity.
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