There is an inconvenient truth the artificial intelligence industry prefers to whisper rather than proclaim: the real cost of putting an LLM into production almost never matches the API invoice . It's like buying a car and discovering that the dealership price didn't include the wheels, the insurance, or the fuel. The label says "$0.15 per million input tokens." What it doesn't say is how many millions of tokens your agent will burn in a delegation loop that spirals out of control at 3 AM. I kno