LLM budgets rarely explode because one person chose a bad model. They explode because no one owned the usage pattern.
Budget by workflow, not by vendor invoice
When teams only look at the monthly bill, they miss where cost is actually being created. Break usage down by workflow:
- support assistant
- internal search
- document analysis
- meeting summaries
This makes optimization actionable because each workflow can be evaluated on value, waste, and guardrails.
Set sensible token policies
Useful policies might limit:
- maximum context size
- fallback model usage
- retry behavior
- evaluation frequency
These are product choices as much as engineering choices. They determine what level of cost the business is willing to trade for quality.
Review cost spikes alongside quality
A cost increase is not always bad. Sometimes it reflects a real gain in task quality. The important question is whether the extra spend improved a business outcome enough to justify itself.