What's your monthly LLM bill? 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 Large Language Models (LLMs), some of the largest tech enterprises (5k+ employees) report LLM bills of less than $1000 per month. Meanwhile, some startups are burning through over $100k on LLMs like 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? As a prelaunch team, we started with running llama cpp on a macbook to $500-$1k monthly openai bills over the past 6 months. How much are you spending and what are your cost saving tricks!?