News & guides
Rate Limit Tiers Explained: RPM, TPM and What Binds First
Provider rate limits are two separate meters and the token one usually binds first. How tiers are assigned, how bursts work, and how to engineer around both.
· 12 min read
Showback Reporting for AI Spend Teams Will Actually Read
How to report LLM spend back to engineering teams without billing them: what a useful report contains, what cadence works, and which unit metrics survive scrutiny.
· 11 min read
The Cost of AI in CI: Why Pipelines Multiply Your Spend
A model call in CI runs on every push, every branch and every matrix leg. The arithmetic behind that multiplication and the gates that keep it bounded.
· 11 min read
The Electricity Cost of Inference: Estimate It Yourself
Energy per token is a property of your deployment, not of the model. Here is the equation, which term dominates, and how to measure your own figure.
· 8 min read
The Hidden Cost of Failed Runs: Tokens Spent on Nothing
A failed agent run costs full price and produces no output. Why cost per successful run is the only figure worth tracking, and how to compute it.
· 8 min readThe Hidden Cost of Retries: Paying Twice for the Same Answer
Retry logic makes pipelines reliable and quietly doubles spend on the items that need it. How to measure what retries actually cost you.
· 8 min read
The Real Cost of Migrating Between Model Providers
Changing the base URL takes an afternoon. Re-tuning prompts, rerunning evals and dual-running takes weeks. A worked estimate structure you fill in with your own numbers.
· 10 min readThe Real Cost of Open vs Closed Models
Open weights cost nothing to download and plenty to run. Here is how licence, hosting and switching costs actually compare, with current per-token rates.
· 8 min readThe ROI of Flat-Rate Billing for AI Development Work
The break-even maths for flat-rate AI plans, why usage variance decides the answer more than the average does, and the workloads where metered billing still wins.
· 9 min readThe Self-Hosting Break-Even Point, With Honest Inputs
Self-hosting beats per-token pricing above some volume. Working out where that point sits once engineering time and idle capacity are included.
· 9 min readThe Token Cost of Long Context: When 1M Is Worth Filling
A million-token window makes enormous prompts possible, not advisable. What filling it costs across model tiers, and when retrieval wins instead.
· 8 min readThe Token Cost of Reasoning Models: Paying for Hidden Output
Reasoning models emit tokens you never see and are billed for at output rates. How much that adds, and when the accuracy is worth it.
· 8 min readReady to try it?
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