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

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