标签：#costcontrol

Short answer: the best way to reduce LLM cost for a product catalog is to measure cost per accepted record, then route each job by difficulty. Count prompt tokens before the call, use a small model for the easy summarize/classify/extract-JSON cases, reserve a stronger model for exceptions, and batch work that can wait. The winning option is the one that preserves the required fields at the lowest cost per accepted result, not the one with the lowest token rate. I build RAG and agent features in Python, so I want this decision to survive contact with production. A catalog description such as “blue jacket, recycled nylon, sizes S–XL” looks easy until one tenant sends HTML, another sends translated attributes, and a third puts three products in one paragraph. The useful unit is therefore a tenant-scoped record with an outcome, a token count, a retry count, and a review decision. Start with the record, not the model For this workflow, the data path is short: normalize a description, count the tokens in the planned prompt, choose a route, request a typed result, validate it, and write the result and its cost to an append-only ledger. A rejected result must remain visible. Otherwise, a cheap model can appear successful simply because invalid JSON and missing attributes disappeared from the report. The ledger needs enough identity to answer a boring but important question: which tenant paid for this retry? I use a job ID, tenant ID, source revision, model route, input token count, output token count, latency, validation status, and review status. Keep the raw description out of ordinary cost dashboards when it contains customer data; the ledger can hold a reference to the source revision instead. Prompt-token counting is a gate, not a decorative metric. If an HTML description expands the prompt beyond its budget, the worker can strip markup, split the record, send it to review, or select a different route. Those choices have different quality consequences, so record the re