Cutting our inference bill by 68% by being obsessive about optimization

Unmonitored token consumption quietly erodes product margins, transforming automated development workflows into runaway operational expenses. Engineers at Cloudflare recently illustrated this vulnerability after their internal code review system doubled in cost per run, prompting a rigorous audit of token usage. By restructuring prompt architecture to exploit prompt caching and deploying intelligent model routing to divert simpler sub-tasks away from expensive frontier models, the team reduced their aggregate inference bill by 68 percent while simultaneously accelerating review turnarounds. The core finding demonstrates that conventional, single-model API patterns waste substantial capital, whereas deliberate token