Estimate AI inference cost for your AI product

Learning to estimate AI inference cost is critical when scaling to millions of users. If you do not estimate AI inference cost accurately, cloud bills can destroy your profit margins. This lesson breaks down total inference cost using a catering metaphor where tokens are the food and chips are the kitchen. You will learn how user behavior drastically changes your budget, as processing a quick question costs less than analyzing a huge document. We explore scenarios showing how daily expenses jump from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars based on user input. To protect margins, we discuss practical product strategies. You will discover how to implement hard limits on text inputs and route simple queries to smaller, cheaper models. Monitoring usage data helps identify heavy compute users before they inflate your bill. In this lesson: - Understanding tokens and compute fees - How input size impacts daily costs - Setting text limits to control spending - Routing queries to cheaper models U2xAI Academy - AI skills for product managers.