How much does it cost to run a text game with LLMs

7.5 relevance

Cost analysis of LLM inference for text games is directly actionable for AI developers.

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Why It Matters

For a platform engineer building AI-powered apps, this provides real-world cost benchmarks across 27 models, showing caching strategies and compaction can significantly reduce LLM inference spend in multi-agent conversational systems.

Key Takeaways

Design your agent orchestration to maximize input token caching (target 30-40% cache hit rate) and use periodic compaction summaries to control context window growth and cost.

How much does it cost to run a text game with LLMs

Summary

Running a text game with 27 frontier LLMs costs $6.36/day for 6 daily users, based on 51,000 API calls over 53 days. Text generation accounts for 63% of costs ($4.01/day), followed by images at 28% and audio at 8%, with a full 50-turn game averaging $1.49. The founder absorbs all costs for 651 free users, relying on caching (up to 43% of input tokens) and compaction summaries to manage expenses.

Author

Aliaksei Zelianouski