Cost Engineering — Cromus Academy
Cost Engineering is the third Cromus Academy track — four lessons on making AI workflow spend deliberate instead of accidental.
Lesson 1 separates every model choice into two axes: cost-quality mode (Eco/Cost/Balanced/Quality) and ecosystem tier, and explains why routing is declared per step. Lesson 2 covers prompt caching, response caching, and token budgets that make runaway spend fail loud. Lesson 3 walks the Reality Check Loop (Predict → Execute → Log → Learn) and how to read drift direction. The capstone applies all four tools to a realistic scenario in order — routing, caching, budgets, reality checks — and issues the Cost Engineering certificate.
Lessons require a free account (no card); grading is deterministic and server-authoritative with no LLM calls.