A cheap model that handles 70% of your requests can cut the bill by 65% — or raise it by 5%
This story is from 2026-10-26. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
A popular way to cut an LLM bill is to send every request to a small, cheap model first and hand it to the big one only when the small one gets it wrong. I priced that setup on five pairs of models from the same vendor, with the small model handling 7 requests out of 10. On one pair it cuts the bil…
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- 2026-10-26 12:00 · DEV Community — AI
A cheap model that handles 70% of your requests can cut the bill by 65% — or raise it by 5%