You're Paying for Tokens You Don't Need

Com Let's look at a real invoice. A mid-size startup running 3 AI agents for internal tooling: code review, documentation generation, and customer draft responses. Monthly API spend: $2,400 Here's where the money actually goes: Token Audit: Where the Budget Goes Category Tokens/month % of budget Could be avoided? Unique, novel tasks 8.2M 18% No Repeated task types (new derivation) 19.4M 43% Yes Context repetition (re-explaining setup) 12.1M 27% Partially Error recovery loops 5.3M 12% Yes 82% of their spend is on work that's either been done before or is recoverable. The Three Culprits 1.