Layered AI: Building Cost-Efficient Intelligence
When people say “I used AI in my app,” it often sounds magical.
But behind the scenes, it’s a game of strategy—especially when it comes to cost.
For one feature, I had to analyze 15,000 code repositories. A quick calculation was alarming: at roughly €0.15 per repo, sounds small, right? But multiplied by 15,000, that’s a potential bill of €2,250. For a side project I’m building solo? That’s a hard no.
So I had to find a smarter way. Instead of accepting that cost, I built a multi-provider AI system to get the job done for under €150. Here’s how the tiered strategy worked:
Layer 1: The Free Foundation (The first 80%)
I started with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash. Its powerful free tier (currently ~500 requests/day) is perfect for creating a cost-effective baseline analysis across the entire dataset. It handled 80% of the repositories without costing a cent.
Catch: Processing all 15,000 repos this way would take about 30 days. For a background task, it’s a perfect first step—but some analyses required a second pass with a different model.
Layer 2: The Quality-Driven Escalation
No single model is perfect for every task. For repos where the initial analysis needed more nuance, my system automatically escalated the job to the best model for that specific challenge:
- Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet for deep, structured reasoning on complex code.
- OpenAI’s GPT-o4 mini for creative problem-solving and edge cases.
This matching of problem complexity to model strength shrank the “hard” set down to about 3,000 repos, reducing the potential cost to €450.
Layer 3: The Final Cost Cut (Optimizing the paid batch)
For this smaller paid batch, I used Batch APIs (offered by both OpenAI and Anthropic) to process jobs asynchronously with roughly a 50% discount.
✅ Final Bill: That €450 cost dropped to ~€225.
It’s not just about using AI. It’s about architecting intelligent, adaptable systems that use the right tool for the right job. By:
- Starting Free
- Escalating Smartly
- Optimizing Every Paid Call
you can turn a project that seems financially impossible into something completely achievable.
Start free, escalate smartly, and always optimize your paid usage.