Model Selection & Cost Engineering

Frontier, reasoning, mid-tier, and open-weight models — what to use when

Capability vs cost vs latency — a decision framework for every task

Intelligent model routing — classifier → tier assignment → fallback chain

Cache hit engineering for 90% cost reduction on stable context

50% cost reduction for non-realtime LLM processing

Ollama, vLLM, Together AI — when self-hosting saves money

Multi-tenant cost tracking, user-level attribution, and budget enforcement

A practical audit framework for reducing AI spend by 40-70%