The Hidden 43% — How Teams Waste Half Their LLM API Budget

The provider dashboards show you one number — your total bill. That's like getting an electricity bill with no breakdown. You just see the total and hope nobody left the AC on. Tbh, if you look closely at your API logs, you are probably wasting around 43% of your budget. I spent the last few weeks analyzing LLM usage across different teams, and the same leaks happen everywhere. Here is where your money is actually going: 1. Retry Storms (34% of waste) Your prompt fails to return valid JSON. The