LLM bills are where automation programmes go to die. Walk me through your cost controls — caching, model tiering, budgets — with specifics, not adjectives.?

The full executive answer

Specifics, in the order they save money. Model tiering: every module is routed by declared complexity — the deepest synthesis work runs on Claude Sonnet with an Opus option on extended budgets, standard analysis on Sonnet, and short phrasing and classification on Haiku, which is a fraction of the cost — so quality is spent where it counts and nowhere else, all reconfigurable without code changes. Response caching: identical inputs return the stored validated answer at zero model cost, and cache hits are recorded as zero-cost events so the savings are visible in dashboards rather than invisible. Prompt caching underneath: the large fixed portion of each prompt — identity, task template, schema, examples — is marked for Anthropic’s cache, so repeated generations re-bill that prefix at the reduced cached rate; that is the single biggest lever on input cost, and we track cache-read and cache-write tokens separately in the ledger to prove it is working.

Then the guardrails on runaway spend, which fail closed: per-tier monthly AI allowances — on the order of a few dollars on trial up to around a hundred and fifty on the top self-serve tier, custom for enterprise — enforced before each paid call; a per-organisation rate limit of thirty paid generations per five minutes that denies on infrastructure error rather than waving traffic through; and a monthly budget ceiling that refuses generation when the ledger is unreadable, because an unmeterable call is an unaffordable call. Every attempt is accounted — including the embarrassing ones: discarded corrective retries, consensus second opinions and adjudicator calls each land in the cost ledger, so our margin math has no hidden column. The honest trade-off on the table: consensus and adjudication multiply cost on flagship modules by design, and they are configuration-disablable under cost pressure — a documented dial, not an accident.