What happens to your LLM bill when prompt caching fails

Prompt caching offers significant cost savings in AI products, providing up to a 10x discount on the largest expenses associated with AI usage by reusing previously processed text at a reduced price. However, the system can fail silently, leading to unexpected cost increases without any direct error notifications, as highlighted by a case where a client's API key incurred four times the usual cost due to caching issues. These failures are often caused by discrepancies in caching implementation across different vendors, as well as data protection measures that inadvertently alter requests, negating caching benefits. Barndoor LLM Gateway addresses these challenges by automating cache instructions in the correct format for each vendor, ensuring data protection does not interfere with caching, and monitoring every request to detect issues promptly. This solution allows companies to manage AI costs proactively, without requiring engineers to become caching experts or compromising on data security, thereby preventing unexpected financial surprises at the end of the month.