Surface cache-hit dispersion to cut LLM vendor spend & vendor-risk

Executive Summary

Many enterprises that have adopted hosted LLMs face two linked problems: rapidly rising per-token bills and opaque vendor metrics that make it hard to verify spend and control vendor risk. In a conservative addressable market of roughly 200,000 enterprises and a $12.0B market opportunity ($60K ACV), teams from developer platform to procurement and security are struggling to quantify where repeated model invocations could be avoided or routed to cheaper alternatives because current telemetry rarely surfaces cacheability or “cache‑hit dispersion” across endpoints, users, and prompts. The product I would build is an observability and policy layer that measures and surfaces cache‑hit dispersion (variance in cacheability) at the request level, provides deterministic hashing and safe local/edge caching primitives, and offers independent spend attribution and verification against vendor bills. Implementation would use OpenTelemetry hooks and optional eBPF agents to collect request telemetry with privacy-preserving hashing, a scoring engine that estimates immediate and annualized savings (conservative targets: 10–40% reduction in vendor spend for cacheable workloads), and a control plane to route or synthesize responses to cheaper models or cached outputs under governance rules. This market is attractive now because per-token billing and enterprise demand for LLM ops, cost transparency, and vendor governance are converging, and telemetry norms make end-to-end instrumentation practical; the provided Market Score (92/100) and Revenue Potential (90/100) reflect that timing. The strongest differentiation will be rigorous, vendor-agnostic attribution and a low-friction SDK/agent that minimizes semantic risk while proving savings; challenges include engineering to preserve semantics and freshness, potential pushback from vendors, and the need to build trust on accuracy and security.