PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A telecom classifies 40,000 closed support tickets every night into root-cause categories for a dashboard analysts open the next morning. The job runs through the real-time Messages API with 20 parallel workers and costs about $600 a night.
Which change cuts the cost most while still meeting the morning deadline?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Submit the whole night's tickets as a single Message Batch job
The Message Batches API charges 50 percent of standard prices for asynchronous work, and most batches complete within an hour, with results available once every request has finished or after 24 hours, whichever comes first, which clears a next-morning dashboard. Ticket text never repeats, so a cache is never read back. Tokens are billed per token, not per hour, so 100 workers change wall-clock time and rate-limit pressure rather than the bill. Streaming changes when tokens arrive, not what they cost.