Checklist: OpenAI Just Released GPT-5.5. Here's What It Actually Does (and What It Costs You)

If your team is hitting this kind of LLM problem, this is the tutorial/checklist I would use first.

Problem focus: OpenAI Just Released GPT-5.5. Here's What It Actually Does (and What It Costs You)

Tutorial

1. Split normal traffic, premium fallback traffic, and retry traffic into separate cost counters before changing models.
2. Add one hard budget guardrail before each call and a deterministic fallback order so expensive hops stay explicit.
3. Track cost by workflow, customer, and fallback reason so you can lower spend without breaking reliability.

Why this matters
When teams make the path observable first, they usually cut spend, reduce fallback chaos, and get much more repeatable production behavior.

CheapAI note
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