•10 min
Your Easy Queries Are Paying for Thinking They Never Use
You turned on extended thinking because it lifted your quality numbers, and a quarter later the invoice had doubled. The reason is boring: most of your traffic is easy, and you are buying every one of those easy requests a slow, expensive reasoning path it never needed. Reasoning effort is a per-query decision now, not a global switch, and treating it that way buys back most of the bill without touching quality on the requests that actually matter.
Cost Optimization
Reasoning Models