How I cut my AI API costs 79% — the boring stuff that actually worked

Look, theres a million posts about AI cost optimization that read like they were written by a consulting firm. This isn't one of those. This is what I actually did, including the parts where I felt dumb. The situation I run an always-on AI assistant on a VPS. It handles email, calendar, code generation, research, monitoring — basically it runs my digital life. Over the past few months I kept adding features without paying attention to costs and one day I looked at my bill: $288.61 for February. For context thats on a €5/month Hetzner VPS. The infrastructure is cheap. The API calls are not. Where the money was actually going When I finally sat down and looked at task-level costs (instead of just the aggregate dashboard), I wanted to crawl under my desk. 40% of my API calls were using Claude Opus. Thats the $15 per million token model. And what was it doing? Status checks. Formatting dates. Checking if emails were unread. Generating heartbeat responses. Its like hiring a brain surgeon to