How to Slash Your OpenAI and Anthropic Token Costs by 50% in Node.js

As LLM prompt context windows expand, developer bills are skyrocketing. Whether you are building complex Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, scraping data to feed an agent, or processing large system instructions, you are paying a massive "token tax" on structural junk like redundant whitespaces, heavy JSON boilerplate, and low-value grammar. The solution isn't switching to cheaper, lower-quality models. The solution is preprocessing your data payload before it hits the model.