I was paying 3x too much for AI APIs. Here's what I changed.

I started using AI APIs about a year ago for side projects I was hacking on in the evenings. Nothing production scale. By month three I was running up about $80 a month in charges. Not wild, but when I broke it down, I was spending way more than I needed to. Half of what I was doing could have run on a cheap model for pennies. I was just lazy. Here's what I actually changed: First, I stopped using the flagship for everything. My defaults were Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT 4o. Both great. Both way ov