[littlestymaar]

> because the caching is transparent to you

It isn't when you look at your invoices though.

> aren't sending every call out to the paid 3rd party, you're more likely intentionally only using it to guide your model periodically.

I'd you do that, you're going to have to pay each token multiple times: both as inferred token on your model, and as input tokens on the third party and your model.

If the conversation are long enough (I didn't do the math but I suspect they don't even need to be that long) it's going to be costlier than just using the paid model with caching.