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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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More source-linked context

Generated Tokenmaxxing editorial thumbnail for Enterprise AI budgets break at the handoff to production
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Enterprise AI budgets break at the handoff to production

Express Computer interviews New Relic India's Ganesh Narasimhadevara on why AI bills keep climbing while the blended cost per million tokens has fallen over a year, from $18.40 in Q1 2025 down to $6.07 in Q1 2026.

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Cisco's Splunk adds Tokenomics to track coding-agent token spend

At Splunk .conf on Sept. 15, Cisco added a Tokenomics module to Splunk Agent Observability. It attributes token spend across AI agents and across employees' use of coding agents, naming Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

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AI Agents Just Got Their Own Company Credit Cards

Mercury launched Agent Cards through Mercury Spend: virtual cards an AI agent spends from inside company-set rules, with transactions outside them declined automatically and no way for the agent to raise its own limit.

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