Ask HN: What's your biggest LLM cost multiplier?
teilom Saturday, January 31, 2026"Tokens per request" has been a misleading cost model for us in production. The real drivers seem to be multipliers: retries/429s, tool fanout, P95 context growth, and safety passes.
What’s been the biggest cost multiplier in your prod LLM systems, and what policies worked (caps, degraded mode, fallback, hard fail)?
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