One post tagged with "opensource"

Originally published on Dev.to on March 16, 2026.
Read the Dev.to version

Exact + semantic caching for AI applications​

In today’s era of AI adoption, there is a distinct shift from integrating AI solutions into business processes to controlling the costs, be it the costs of a cloud solution, a local LLM deployment, or the cost of tokens spent in chatbots. If your solution includes repeated questions and uses an OpenAI-compatible model, and if you are looking for a simple, free and effective way to immediately cut your company’s daily token costs, there is one infrastructural solution that does it right out of the box.

AI Cost Firewall is a free open-source API gateway that decides which requests actually need to reach the LLM and which can be answered from previous results without additional token costs.

The gateway consists of a Rust-based firewall “decider”, a Redis database, a Qdrant vector store, Prometheus for metrics scraping, and Grafana for monitoring. All the tools are deployed with a single docker compose command and are available for use in less than a minute.

Once deployed, AI Cost Firewall sits transparently between your application and the LLM provider. Your chatbot, AI assistant, or internal automation continues to send requests exactly the same way as before with the only difference that the API endpoint now points to the firewall instead of directly to the model provider. The firewall then performs an instant check before deciding whether the request should actually reach the LLM and raise your monthly bill.