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RAG Is Burning Money — I Built a Cost Control Layer to Fix It | Towards Data Science

Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost-and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and circui…

Published 2026-05-29Source: Towards Data Science
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Why it matters

Tokenmaxxing is fundamentally an economics problem: what teams reward, measure, and cache determines whether AI spend turns into throughput or waste. This item highlights an operational lever you can monitor and govern.

Tokenmaxxing read

Actionable token discipline: track tokens-per-successful-task (not just total tokens), cap runaway contexts, and instrument cache behavior. Treat any changes in model/version/tokenization or tool defaults as budget-reset events and re-baseline.

Source takeaway

The source frames it as: Most RAG systems are optimized for answer quality, not cost-and that blind spot gets expensive fast. In this article, I break down a production-ready cost control layer combining semantic caching, query routing, token budgeting, and c…

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How Ramp is Fuelling AI Spend Management Expansion

Ramp closed a $750M round at a $44B valuation and is launching AI token spend management, procurement agents, and accounting agents on top of $1B+ annualized revenue and 70,000+ customers.

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