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To reduce AI API costs you need levers that change the bill by a verifiable mechanism, not vague advice. This hub names all seven, right-size the model, prompt caching, the Batch API, routing and fallback, local versus API, token discipline, and RAG over long-context, with a
The cheapest AI API by published token rate in June 2026 is DeepSeek V4 Flash, but the lowest sticker rate is rarely the lowest bill. Here is a dated, source-linked price table for DeepSeek, Gemini, GPT, and Claude, the cost-per-task math that output tokens dominate, and the
Prompt caching stores the unchanging part of your Claude prompt once and bills every later read at a tenth of the price, same model, same output. Here is the token math, the break-even point, and how to wire it into an n8n agent loop.
