CTO cuts LLM costs from $4,800 to $120/month by switching models, no code rewritten
A CTO at an unnamed company reduced their monthly AI inference bill by roughly 40 times — from $4,800 to under $200 — without any code changes or customer-facing disruption. The company had been using OpenAI's GPT-4o for summarization, a customer support copilot, and internal tools, paying $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. After evaluating several alternative models, the CTO found DeepSeek V4 Flash offered comparable quality at just $0.18 per million input and $0.25 per million output tokens. A blind A/B test on 500 production prompts confirmed that DeepSeek V4 Flash performed within statistical noise of GPT-4o on summarization tasks. The CTO noted that the migration required no new routing logic or fallback code, and that meaningful cost savings were available even within OpenAI's own model lineup via GPT-4o-mini.
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