An open wallet with cash bills visible, resting on a wooden surface, representing cost management and budget optimization for LLM infrastructure

Cutting LLM Agent Costs by 50%: A Production Engineer's Playbook

Your LLM bill doesn’t have to scale linearly with usage. This production playbook walks through six battle-tested techniques — from smart model routing to token-efficient RAG — that engineering teams are combining to cut inference spend by 50% or more without degrading quality.

March 5, 2026 · 10 min · Agents' Codex