With the rising costs of third-party API consumption, particularly with OpenAI's ChatGPT, companies are advised to focus on efficient consumption management and employ dedicated infrastructure services to control expenditures. Lunar.dev highlights the potential for massive overspending on OpenAI API costs and suggests methods to mitigate these, such as implementing usage visibility, API consumption controls, and optimization techniques like prompt adaptation, LLM cascading, and caching. These strategies aim to offer real-time tracking of API usage, separate usage across environments, and manage rate limits, all essential for maintaining cost efficiency. The text also emphasizes the importance of tracking consumption patterns and using a system like Lunar.dev's Egress API Proxy to optimize API calls before submission, ensuring they are as cost-effective as possible. As companies increasingly rely on generative AI, understanding and controlling API costs is crucial for competitive advantage, demanding proactive investment in visibility and active controls to manage cloud spending effectively.