Lilly Tech Systems
AI Cost Management
AI APIs can go from affordable experiments to shocking invoices overnight. This course teaches you how to understand token-based pricing, implement cost tracking, optimize spending without sacrificing quality, and build sustainable AI budgets that scale with your business.
What You'll Learn
By the end of this course, you'll have the tools and strategies to manage AI costs effectively at any scale.
Token Economics
Understand how AI providers price their services, what drives costs, and how to estimate spending before you commit.
Cost Tracking
Implement monitoring and alerting systems that give you real-time visibility into AI spending by team, feature, and model.
Optimization
Apply proven techniques to reduce costs by 50-90% without meaningful quality degradation — from prompt engineering to model routing.
Budgeting
Build AI budgets that account for growth, establish spending guardrails, and present AI ROI to stakeholders.
Course Lessons
Follow the lessons in order for a complete AI cost management strategy, or jump to the topic you need most.
1. Introduction
Understand why AI costs spiral out of control, the key cost drivers, and the framework for managing AI spending effectively.
2. Token Pricing
Deep dive into how AI providers price their services, input vs output tokens, batch pricing, and comparing providers.
3. Cost Tracking
Implement cost monitoring with logging, dashboards, alerts, and attribution. Know exactly where every dollar goes.
4. Optimization
Reduce costs through caching, prompt optimization, model selection, batching, and intelligent routing strategies.
5. Budgeting
Create AI budgets, forecast costs at scale, implement spending guardrails, and build the business case for AI investment.
6. Best Practices
FinOps for AI, organizational cost culture, vendor negotiation, and building a sustainable cost management practice.
Prerequisites
What you need before starting this course.
- Experience using at least one AI API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.)
- Basic understanding of tokens and how LLMs process text
- Familiarity with cloud cost management concepts (helpful)
- No coding required for most lessons; some examples use Python