How I Cut LLM API Costs by 90% Using Cheaper Models

Short summary

A bootcamp grad optimized LLM costs by comparing OpenAI's GPT-4o ($10/M output tokens) against cheaper alternatives like DeepSeek V4 Flash ($1.10/M) and GLM-4 Plus ($0.80/M), achieving 12.5x cost reduction with minimal code changes. Context windows and benchmarks vary significantly, but cheaper models deliver comparable quality for most tasks. Swapping providers requires only changing the API endpoint—potentially saving 40-65% on LLM costs.

• •GLM-4 Plus costs 12.5x less than GPT-4o with comparable performance for summarization
• •OpenAI-compatible APIs let you swap models with a single code change
• •Context window and latency matter more than raw benchmark scores for most use cases

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.