AI feature usage is up but profit is down: audit these five cost sinks first
djgoel123 · reddit · 2026-11-03
A practical guide for teams running AI features in production: usage growth exposes prototype-stage costs, so audit oversized prompts, over-retrieval, repeated retries, expensive models on simple tasks, and multi-call actions before swapping models. Measure cost per successful task, not per API request—a cheaper model that fails more often isn't cheaper. Gains usually come from better retrieval, caching, routing, and removing steps.
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