Your Agentic AI Bill Is a Prompt Engineering Problem in Disguise

Six techniques beyond caching that cut token spend by 60-90% - with working code for each image 1 An unoptimised agent running at 100 messages a day at 166K input tokens costs around $2,490 a month on Claude Opus 4.6. That number is not a warning label. It is a real billing scenario I watched unfold on a healthcare pipeline I helped build at my current firm. The pipeline had 14 tools registered. Every turn sent all 14 tool schemas to the model - regardless of whether the current query had anything to do with 11 of them.