Cut LLM Costs with Caching

Where the money goes

You pay per token, per call. Caching avoids paying twice for the same work.

Three layers

1. Exact-match cache — hash the prompt; return the stored answer for identical requests.
2. Semantic cache — embed the query and reuse answers for similar questions above a similarity threshold.
3. Prompt caching — many APIs let you cache a long, reused prefix (system prompt, docs) so you're billed less for it on repeat calls.

A quick win

Start with an exact-match cache around your most repetitive endpoint. It's a few lines of code and often cuts cost and latency immediately — especially for FAQs and retries.