EVERYTHING AIAI engineering, made visual
Visual edition planned
Phase 11 · Lesson 11BuildPython45 min17 lessons in phase

Caching, Rate Limiting & Cost Optimization

Most AI startups do not die from bad models. They die from bad unit economics. A single GPT-4o call costs fractions of a cent. Ten thousand users making ten calls per day costs $250 in input tokens alone -- before you charge a single dollar. The companies that survive are the ones that treat every API call as a financial transaction, not a function call.

Visual edition planned

This lesson isn’t interactive yet.

It is part of the curriculum and will get the same treatment as Phase 1 — a visual cover, hands-on labs, derivations with numeric checks and a quiz. Until then, the original lesson is the best place to read it:

Part of Phase 11LLM Engineering. Use the previous / next cards below to keep browsing the phase.