Token pricing is just the start. Here's what actually breaks budgets.
The Hidden Costs of LLM APIs Your API bill has more line items than you think. 1. System prompts sent on every request — easy to forget. 2. Retries on rate limits or 5xx errors. 3. Tool definitions counted as input tokens. 4. Streaming — pay for full output even if user disconnects. 5. Long contexts — pricing often scales non linearly above 100K tokens. Instrument before you scale.