WHY YOUR AI BILL KEEPS EXPLODING

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Most AI bills balloon for a dumb reason: companies run frontier models for everything, when open-source models are now nearly as good and often 90% cheaper. One team swapped off Opus and cut costs by 93% with nobody noticing. The fastest win is routing: send only the genuinely hard work to the expensive model and push the rest to a cheap one, and the bill drops the same day. The other money pit is rewarding raw usage, because the minute you post a most-tokens-used leaderboard people burn cash to top it, so track spend per person and judge everyone on impact instead.