Api Cost Optimization

GPT-5.6 Sol pricing now reads $2.00 input / $10.00 output per million tokens on OpenRouter’s OpenAI route, down from $5.00 / $30.00 in mid-August. That is a real 50% cut. It was not OpenAI’s price cut — it is a router promotion stacked on top of a separate OpenAI reduction to $4 / $20. That distinction is the whole article, because the two numbers are different prices on different layers, and almost every story about this model conflates them. ...

Prompt caching is the single highest-ROI optimization available for production LLM applications. If you run 10,000 requests per day with an 8K-token cached system prompt on Anthropic Claude, you save roughly $576/month — with a few lines of code change. OpenAI’s automatic caching requires zero code changes and gives you a 50% discount on repeated input tokens. Anthropic’s explicit caching offers up to 90% savings. This guide covers both, plus Gemini, with production code examples, real cost numbers, and the anti-patterns that silently destroy your cache hit rate. ...