A Netflix Engineer Built a Free Tool That Cuts Your AI Token Bill by 88%

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Imagine!!!
You send 10,000 tokens to your AI. It uses 1,200 to answer. You paid for 8,800 tokens that did absolutely nothing. Netflix engineer Tejas Chopra built Headroom, a free, open-source tool that compresses the noise before it reaches the model. Same answer. 88% fewer tokens. Zero code changes. 39,000 GitHub stars in 5 months.

Here's how to start using Headroom to reduce your AI token cost today.

You've Been Paying for Tokens That Do Nothing

Let me show you something that will make you immediately understand why this matters.

Your AI agent is debugging a production issue. It reads a log file. The log file is 10,000 lines long.

Here is what is actually in those 10,000 lines:

2026-07-22 10:00:01 INFO GET /api/users 200 45ms2026-07-22 10:00:02 INFO GET /api/tasks 200 32ms2026-07-22 10:00:03 INFO POST /api/tasks 201 67ms... [9,946 more lines exactly like this]2026-07-22 14:23:45 FATAL OutOfMemoryError at TaskService.java:234......

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