The $341 Opus bill that should have been $40
Early version of a content automation. Every prompt ran through Claude Opus because quality. Client opened his API dashboard a month in and saw the damage. We rebuilt the router the same day.
Claude for taste. Haiku for speed. Plain pattern matching for neither.
What went wrong
We built a brief-to-published automation for a coach. Ten prompts in the chain: parse headline, extract hook, rewrite for LinkedIn, rewrite for X, rewrite for newsletter, etc. Every single prompt went to Opus because it was the smart move. In a month, the API bill hit $341 for a coach shipping one brief a week.
The fix
We rebuilt the router. Haiku for structure parsing (pull the hook out of a brief, split a thread into posts). Opus only for the taste-sensitive rewrite passes where voice actually mattered. Plain pattern matching for headline cleanup. Bill dropped to $38 in the next full month. Quality held.
The lesson
Default to the cheapest model that holds quality. Upgrade per prompt only where the upgrade changes the output a reader can see. Every client now gets a model routing table shown up-front, with approx monthly cost on each route. No surprises.
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