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FrugalAI Research
44 practical, sourced guides for teams responsible for LLM cost, quality, reliability, and financial control.
Pricing · 7 min
Anthropic and OpenAI list the same per-token price at three tiers. The bill differs on cache reads, long prompts and token counts. Four hypothetical workloads priced from both rate cards, verified 2026-10-22.
Cost Monitoring · 6 min
A decision rule for choosing between cost monitoring and an LLM gateway: monitoring reports spend after the fact, a gateway can refuse a request before it is sent. What each can and cannot do, from the provider and LiteLLM docs. Verified 2026-10-21.
Cost Monitoring · 6 min
Three ways to see LLM spend without editing application code: provider cost APIs, a proxy behind a base URL, and trace export. What each one can and cannot attribute, with the limits the provider docs list. Verified 2026-10-20.
Gateways · 7 min
Kong AI Gateway prices each request and can enforce cost limits per consumer, group, and model. This guide covers how the cost figure is built, what the docs list as limits, and a checklist for comparing any gateway on budget enforcement. Verified 2026-10-19.
Cost control · 7 min
An agent re-sends its whole history on every step, so cost grows faster than step count. This guide works through a 20-step and 40-step loop on Claude Sonnet 5.5 prices, adds tool fees, and lists the controls that cap a run. Verified 2026-10-18.
Caching · 7 min
GPTCache is a library, not a service. Compare it with LiteLLM's semantic cache and Upstash Semantic Cache on scope, tenant isolation, agent traffic, and worked savings math. Verified 2026-10-17.
Cost Engineering · 6 min
Provider cost APIs stop at the key, project, or workspace. Per-customer attribution needs a ledger you write yourself, reconciled to the provider total. Worked math included. Verified 2026-10-16.
Cost Engineering · 6 min
A forecast built from your own daily cost data, with worked math for flat, growth, and stress cases, and the limits of the Anthropic and OpenAI cost APIs that decide how you pull the data. Verified 2026-10-15.
Comparison · 6 min
Most OpenRouter alternative lists rank features. This guide compares what OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway, Cloudflare AI Gateway, and LiteLLM charge on top of provider prices and what each can enforce as a spend limit, with fee math on one monthly workload. Verified 2026-10-14.
Pricing · 6 min
Aggregator tables list hundreds of models. This guide compares the three vendors' own price lists tier by tier, prices one monthly workload on each, and flags the scheduled Gemini price increases and Haiku 5.5 long-prompt surcharge. Verified 2026-10-13.
Cost optimization · 6 min
Counting the tokens in your prompts and replies undercounts what OpenAI bills. This guide lists the six gaps between visible text and billed usage, with worked examples and a reconciliation checklist. Verified 2026-10-09.
Comparisons · 6 min
Helicone is a proxy gateway that can block spend; Langfuse is a tracing and evaluation platform that records it. This comparison covers pricing units, cost-based limits, and the 2026 acquisitions that changed both roadmaps. Verified 2026-10-08.
Pricing · 7 min
OpenAI's pricing page lists rates per million tokens. This guide turns those rates into per-request and per-job costs for four common workloads, and lists the multipliers that push a bill above the token math. Prices verified 2026-10-07.
AI FinOps · 7 min
Most AI spend management advice is written for procurement. This guide covers the engineering side: how key and workspace design decides attribution, how to pull OpenAI and Anthropic costs into one ledger, and where alerts and hard limits belong. Verified 2026-10-06.
Comparisons · 7 min
LiteLLM and Portkey both promise spend control. This comparison looks at where each one enforces a budget, what a blocked request returns, which plan includes it, and what changed after Palo Alto Networks acquired Portkey. Verified 2026-10-05.
Pricing · 7 min
Current Anthropic API pricing for every Claude model, plus the modifiers that change the real bill: the newer tokenizer, cache reads, batch, fast mode, US-only inference, and tool overhead. Verified 2026-10-04.
Cost optimization · 6 min
Four layers of LLM cost optimization, ordered by how much quality evidence each one needs, with provider discount terms verified on 2026-10-03.
Budgets · 7 min
Where the Claude API spend limit lives, what each tier allows, what your application receives when a cap is hit, and why one organization-wide cap is rarely enough.
Comparisons · 8 min
How the two most common model-access layers differ on fees, deployment, cost controls, and governance, and when neither is enough.
LLM gateways · 8 min
A practical explanation of the proxy layer between applications and model providers, including routing, caching, policy, and observability.
Model routing · 9 min
How to route routine requests to lower-cost models without silently sacrificing output quality.
Research · 8 min
A plain-language guide to the FrugalGPT research and how to translate cascades into production controls.
Research · 8 min
What RouteLLM measures, what its results mean, and how to avoid copying benchmark claims into production forecasts.
Caching · 9 min
How semantic response caches work, when they save money, and the controls needed to prevent unsafe reuse.
Caching · 7 min
A side-by-side guide to provider prefix caches and gateway response caches.
AI FinOps · 9 min
How FinOps practices change when model selection, tokens, cache policy, and quality affect the bill in real time.
AI FinOps · 8 min
A durable tagging and ledger model for chargeback, showback, and AI unit economics.
Budgets · 8 min
Design progressive AI spend controls that preserve essential workflows while slowing noncritical usage.
Model routing · 8 min
A rollout method that compares alternative model decisions without changing production answers.
Evaluation · 10 min
How to combine deterministic checks, golden sets, judges, human review, and rollback thresholds.
Implementation · 8 min
A phased migration checklist for base URLs, keys, streaming, tools, retries, and rollback.
Architecture · 7 min
A clear boundary between request-path enforcement and post-request analysis.
Strategy · 9 min
How to compare internal gateway work with managed products using control, risk, and total operating cost.
Comparisons · 8 min
When an OpenAI-compatible proxy is enough and when budget owners need deeper allocation, policy, and reconciliation.
Comparisons · 7 min
A neutral framework for comparing an AI control plane with a FinOps-first request gateway.
Comparisons · 7 min
Compare edge proxy capabilities with a control plane built around model economics and team budgets.
Comparisons · 7 min
How to compare LLM observability with a gateway centered on financial policy and routing.
AI FinOps · 8 min
A workflow for tracking provider price changes, cached-token rates, and their impact on real traffic.
Unit economics · 8 min
A measurement model for connecting inference spend to resolved tickets, accepted drafts, and completed workflows.
Reliability · 8 min
Design provider resilience with bounded retries, equivalent capabilities, and honest effective-cost accounting.
Security · 9 min
A security baseline for the request layer that sees model traffic across applications and providers.
AI FinOps · 9 min
A repeatable close process for provider invoices, request ledgers, budgets, savings, and unattributed usage.
Procurement · 10 min
A procurement checklist covering compatibility, routing, security, FinOps, evaluation, reliability, and exit.
Cost optimization · 9 min
A prioritized savings plan across measurement, prompt design, caching, routing, batch work, and budgets.