The Local LLM Stack Nobody Told You About (I Cut My AI Bill by 97%)
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
AI Regulation
AI Business
Six months ago I was spending $400/month on OpenAI API calls for a side project with exactly zero paying users. Today that same project runs on $11/month - mostly electricity. Here's the exact stack and the decisions that got me there. Why "Just Use GPT-4" Is a Trap for Builders The seduction is real: paste your API key, make one client.chat.completions.create call, ship. Works great until you actually get traction, or until you realize you've been burning tokens on tasks that don't need frontier model intelligence. The mistake is treating AI cost as a fixed percentage of revenue. It's not.