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The practices that keep your token and API spend from spiraling out of hand.
Because usage-based billing scales with how much the model reads and writes, cost control is the set of levers you pull to keep that bounded: caching prompts, picking cheaper models for easy tasks, capping output length, and trimming context. It matters because an unattended agent loop can quietly rack up real money. Example: routing simple classification to a small fast model and reserving the big expensive model only for hard reasoning steps can cut a bill by 10x.
Plainly
Think of Cost Control as the checklist that keeps the app open for real people. The practices that keep your token and API spend from spiraling out of hand.
In practice
Use it when a change has to survive deploys, users, incidents, analytics, or billing reality. In practice, define the owner, input, output, and failure mode before you rely on it.