Four Amazon Bedrock inference choices that affect cost

The post explains how four request-level Amazon Bedrock settings—prompt cache duration, service tier, reasoning effort, and maxTokens—can change token processing and billing rates without altering the model or prompt. It reports tests showing that a 1-hour cache pays off from the second request per hour when gaps exceed 5 minutes, that Flex on Nova 2 Lite processed the same tokens at half the Standard rate in us-west-2, that lowering effort from high to low cut median output tokens by 169% on an agent test, and that a 155-token maxTokens fence avoided 1,893 output tokens in one test. It recommends confirming model support, changing one setting at a time, and verifying effects through response metadata, CloudWatch metrics, invocation logs, and billing data.