Cost Control for LLM Apps: Caching, Batching, Model Tiers
The levers that actually move an Azure OpenAI bill — model tier, the four caches, output discipline, batching — in order of impact.
Cost-Optimization
Streamlining AI Development with LiteLLM Proxy: A Comprehensive Guide
Deep Dive
AI & LLM
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May 25, 2025
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8 min read
At some point I had three side projects each talking to a different LLM provider, with API keys pasted into three .env files and three slightly different client wrappers. Swapping GPT-4o for Claude in any of them meant editing code. That is a silly amount of friction for what is, underneath, the same chat-completion call, so I put a LiteLLM proxy in front of everything and never went back.
