Insightsby TokenBurner
Turn pricing tables into decision-ready metrics.
OpenAI vs Anthropic Pricing: Complete Cost Comparison Guide
GPT-4o vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet pricing breakdown. Input/output costs, batch discounts, and when each provider makes financial sense for your workload.
AI Agent Costs: Why Your Agent Burned $50 in 10 Minutes
Agentic workflows can 10x your LLM costs. Tool loops, context accumulation, and retry storms explained. How to build agents that don't bankrupt you.
Fine-Tuning vs RAG: When Each Is Cheaper (And When It Isn't)
Fine-tuning has upfront cost; RAG has per-query cost. Break-even math, when to use which, and how to avoid the worst of both.
Embedding Model Pricing: OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage Cost Comparison
RAG costs start with embeddings. Per-million-token pricing for text-embedding-3, Cohere embed-v3, Voyage—and when to switch providers to cut costs.
Batch vs Live: A Practical Rulebook to Cut LLM Costs by 50%
We all know OpenAI's Batch API offers a 50% discount. So why aren't you using it? Here is a brutal reality check on when to wait 24 hours and when to pay full price.
RTX 4090 VRAM Limits: What Models Actually Fit
A single RTX 4090 can't run Llama-3 70B at usable speeds. Here's the VRAM math, quantization tradeoffs, and what actually works on 24GB.
Context Window Size vs Cost: Why 200K Tokens Isn't Free
Long context models charge more per token. When to use 8K vs 128K vs 1M—and how context length blows up RAG and agent bills.
RAG Cost Breakdown: Vector DB and Context Overhead
A RAG app costing $3,400/month instead of $300. The breakdown: vector DB read units, context stuffing, and model selection. Practical fixes.
Prompt Caching: How to Get Cache Hits and Reduce Costs
Prompt caching can cut input token costs by 75%, but most apps get zero cache hits. Structure prompts correctly, measure cached_tokens, and stop re-paying for the same prefix.
Llama 70B VRAM Requirements: RTX 4090, 3090, A100
Tested Llama 3 70B on RTX 4090, 3090, and A100. Exact VRAM breakdown for FP16 vs Q4 quantization, KV cache overhead, and why OOM errors happen.
Cursor Model Selection: Cost vs Performance Breakdown
Cursor credits burned in 3 days. How model choice, context size, and Composer usage affect costs. Practical tier list and optimization strategies.
Pinecone Serverless vs Weaviate Cloud: Cost Comparison
Vector DB pricing: storage is cheap, compute is not. Break-even analysis of Pinecone serverless vs fixed instances (Weaviate/Qdrant) for RAG workloads at scale.