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10h • General Discussion 💬
Fixed Their $4,200/Month OCR Bill to $67 (Same 50,000 Documents)
Client showed me their AI processing bill. Made me physically angry.
THE EXPENSIVE DISASTER
OpenAI costs: $4,200/month
Document volume: 50,000 pages
Processing method: Send ENTIRE documents to GPT-4
Success rate: 91%
Average cost per page: $0.084
Their workflow investigation:
- Sending blank pages to AI ($0.08 each)
- Processing every page individually (no batching)
- Using GPT-4 for simple text extraction
- No caching of repeated document types
- Retrying failures with same expensive model
Built them something embarrassingly simple.
THE COST-KILLER n8n WORKFLOW
Node 1: Document classifier and page counter
Node 2: Blank page detection (skip processing)
Node 3: Intelligent routing based on complexity:
Route A: Simple text documents → Basic OCR ($0.001/page)
Route B: Forms/tables → Structured parsing ($0.008/page)
Route C: Complex/handwritten → AI processing ($0.04/page)
Route D: Previously processed → Cache lookup ($0.0001/page)
Node 4: Batch processing (groups of 50)
Node 5: Confidence validation and smart retry
Node 6: Results compilation and delivery
FIRST MONTH RESULTS
Pages processed: 50,000
- Blank pages skipped: 8,200 (16%)
- Cache hits: 12,000 (24%)
- Basic OCR: 18,500 (37%)
- Structured parsing: 8,800 (18%)
- AI processing needed: 2,500 (5%)
New monthly cost: $67
Old cost: $4,200
Savings: $4,133/month ($49,596 annually)
Accuracy improvement: 91% → 98.4%
THE BRUTAL EFFICIENCY BREAKDOWN
Why it works:
- Most documents are repeats (invoice templates, forms)
- 60% of pages need basic OCR only
- AI processing required for <10% of content
- Intelligent routing prevents overpaying
Client reaction: "Why didn't our previous developer do this?"
Answer: Because they got paid by complexity, not efficiency.
SCALED THIS APPROACH
Applied to 6 more clients bleeding AI costs:
- Average cost reduction: 93%
- Total monthly savings generated: $27,400
- My optimization fee: 25% of first-year savings
- Annual revenue from cost reduction: $82,200
THE OPTIMIZATION TEMPLATE
Available as n8n workflow: "AI Cost Optimization Router"
- Document classification logic
- Intelligent routing rules
- Cost tracking and reporting
- Batch processing optimization
Current client AI bill total: $890/month (was $31,400)
They pay me $6,850/month to maintain these optimizations.
Revenue from "boring" cost optimization: $6,850/month
Revenue from "exciting" AI features: $1,200/month
The unglamorous work pays the most.
Who else is bleeding money on unnecessary AI costs that smart routing could fix?
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Fixed Their $4,200/Month OCR Bill to $67 (Same 50,000 Documents)
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