Managing Costs with the OpenAI Assistants API

The OpenAI Assistants API can lead to unexpectedly high and unpredictable costs due to its architectural design, which automatically includes entire conversation histories and documents in every API request. This process causes token usage to balloon, even for simple interactions, resulting in surprisingly large bills for developers. An alternative platform, Ragwalla, addresses this by using an internal vector store to intelligently retrieve only the most relevant past messages for context. This method dramatically reduces token consumption, while also providing explicit cost controls and support for a wider range of cost-effective LLMs.