Burning Money on GPT-4

Wow... we've been burning money for 6 months So... because I am such a hard worker, I spent my weekend going through our openai usage and we're at ~$1200/month. I honestly thought that was just the cost of doing business then i actually looked at what we're using gpt-4 for, and its seriously a waste of money: extracting phone numbers from emails, checking if text contains profanity, reformatting json and literally just uppercasing text in one function. I ended up just moving all the dumb stuff to gpt-4o-mini. Same exact outputs, bill dropped to ~$200 Am I an idiot? How much are you guys spending?

A Reddit-style screenshot shows a developer reviewing six months of OpenAI usage and discovering that expensive GPT-4 calls were being used for trivial text-processing tasks. After switching those tasks to GPT-4o-mini, the monthly bill falls from about $1,200 to about $200, making the joke about needless AI overspending and inefficient engineering. It is shared as a reaction to wasting money on overpowered tools or overengineering simple tasks. EN: A Reddit-style screenshot shows a developer reviewing six months of OpenAI usage and discovering that expensive GPT-4 calls were being used for trivial text-processing tasks. After switching those tasks to GPT-4o-mini, the monthly bill falls from about $1,200 to about $200, making the joke about needless AI overspending and inefficient engineering. It is shared as a reaction to wasting money on overpowered tools or overengineering simple tasks.

• @gentoomemes / 18586 2025-09-10