The Silent Costs of AI APIs Nobody Warns You About

The first time I saw my AI API bill, I laughed. Then I cried. Then I spent three hours digging through a spreadsheet trying to figure out which endpoint had burned through $1,400 in a week. The pricing page had said $0.002 per 1K tokens. Clean, simple, easy to understand. But that was just the list price. The real cost was hiding in places nobody talks about until you're already trapped. I've…