How to Cut LLM API Costs by 50-80% with a Relay

LLM API bills can quietly become one of your biggest line items. The good news: for almost every major model except open-source ones, a relay provider offers a meaningful discount over official pricing - often 50-80% - with no code changes. Here is how the savings work and how to capture them safely.

Why relays are cheaper

Relay (gateway) providers aggregate demand and purchase capacity in bulk, then pass part of the discount to you. Because they are OpenAI-compatible, you keep your SDK and only change the base_url and key. The result:

• OpenAI models: relays often undercut official pricing substantially.
• Claude: relays can be several times cheaper than going direct.
• Gemini: relays frequently offer better effective rates and rate limits.
• Open-source models (Llama, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek): already cheap, and relays sometimes go even lower.

Five tactics to lower your bill

1. Switch to a discounted gateway

The single biggest lever is moving traffic to a gateway with bulk-discounted rates. This is a one-line change and applies across every model you call.

2. Right-size the model

Do not send every request to a flagship model. Route simple tasks (classification, extraction, short replies) to fast, cheap models, and reserve premium models for hard reasoning. A gateway makes this trivial because switching models is just a string change.

3. Cut wasted tokens

• Trim long system prompts and repeated context.
• Cap max_tokens to what you actually need.
• Summarize or truncate history instead of resending full transcripts.

4. Cache repeated work

Cache identical or near-identical requests (FAQs, templated prompts). Even simple application-level caching removes a surprising share of traffic.

5. Use streaming and stop conditions

Stream responses and stop early when you have enough output. This reduces output tokens, which are usually the most expensive part of a request.

A simple savings model

Suppose you spend $2,000/month on a premium model used for everything. Two changes often help the most:

1. Move to a discounted gateway (say 40% lower effective price): ~$1,200/month.
2. Route ~60% of traffic to a cheaper model that handles those tasks fine: another large reduction on that portion.

Combined, many teams land in the 50-70% savings range - without degrading quality on the requests that actually need a top model.

Do it without breaking quality

• Benchmark on your own tasks, not generic leaderboards. Cheaper models often match premium ones on routine work.
• Keep premium models for the hard 20% of requests where quality clearly matters.
• Measure cost per successful outcome, not just cost per token.

Safety checklist before switching

• Verify the gateway is not substituting or watering down the model (run a known prompt and compare behavior).
• Start with a small top-up to test stability.
• Keep a backup provider configured for failover.
• Confirm billing rules and that invoices are available if you need them.

FAQ

Will switching to a relay change my code? No. With an OpenAI-compatible gateway you change the base URL and key; your SDK and request format stay the same.

Is cheaper always worse quality? Not necessarily. Discounts often come from bulk purchasing and routing efficiency, not from degrading the model. Just verify the provider serves the real upstream model.

What is the fastest win? Move traffic to a discounted gateway and route easy tasks to cheaper models. Both are low-effort and apply immediately.

Want to see real, discounted per-model pricing? Browse the Model Square on TokenVoke, read the docs, or get an API key and start saving today.