LLM API Token Costs: At What Scale Do They Start Hurting Your SaaS?
LLM API Token Costs: At What Scale Do They Start Hurting Your SaaS? TL;DR LLM API costs can seem negligible at first, but they have a nasty habit of sneaking up on you as your user base grows. The SaaS community on Reddit has been wrestling with exactly when token costs become a real business problem — and the answer depends heavily on your use case, model choice, and pricing strategy. Self-hosting alternatives like RunPod and Lambda Labs exist, but they come with their own tradeoffs. If you’re building anything LLM-powered, you need to think about cost architecture before you scale, not after. ...