Stop Wasting Tokens: How to Cut Your LLM Costs by 97%

The hidden tax in your AI pipeline If you're building with GPT or Claude, you’ve probably done this: Call an API Get a big JSON response Send the whole thing to your LLM Seems harmless, right? It’s not. You’re quietly burning money on something you don’t even use. 💸 The "metadata tax" Let’s say your API returns this: { "order" : { "id" : 123 , "user" : { "name" : "Midhun" , "email" : "midhun@email.com" }, "items" : [ ... 100 objects ... ], "metadata" : { ... tons of fields ... } } } Now ask yourself: 👉 What does your LLM actually need? Probably just this: { "name" : "Midhun" , "email" : "midhun@email.com" } 🤯 Here’s the problem LLMs don’t care what’s useful. They charge you for  everything . Full JSON → ~1500 tokens Useful data → ~60 tokens 👉 You’re paying ~25x more than necessary. And this happens on  every request . 🧠 “I’ll just parse it manually” Sure… you  can  do this: user = data . get ( " order " , {}). get ( " user " , {}) email = user . get ( " email " ) Now imagine: 10+ field