Monthly LLM bills? How Much Are You Really Spending?

We’re a data company that recently interviewed over 60 large enterprise VPs and 70+ startup engineers and CTOs. Here’s what’s intriguing: Despite the massive hype around GenAI, some of the larger tech enterprises (1k+ employees) reported LLM bills of less than $1000 per month. Meanwhile, some startups are burning through over $100k on OpenAI, Claude, or even self-hosting models like LLaMA. Is this a case of enterprises being cautious, or are they simply seeing through the LLM hype that startups are buying into? Are you spending big on LLMs, or are you getting by with cheaper alternatives like LLaMA-CPP and other quantized models that run on CPUs? Let’s find out who’s spending what! Starting with us, for a prelaunch, 7 people team, we started with running llama.cpp on an old macbook to a monthly bills between $500-1k over the past 6 months. How about you? Comment below and even share your hacks!