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Feeding costs for reptiles rarely stay flat over an animal's lifetime, and livefood is often the part of the budget that shifts the most as an animal grows. Planning for that change, rather than being caught out by it, makes ongoing costs a lot easier to manage.
Most keepers feeding insectivorous or carnivorous reptiles will, at some point, weigh up live food against frozen food. The two are not simply different products, they are different systems with different storage, handling and preparation needs, and understanding those differences matters more than any argument about which is better.
A reptile that suddenly turns its nose up at food is one of the more unsettling things a keeper can notice. It happens periodically in plenty of collections and often settles on its own, but appetite is also one of the clearest signals a reptile gives about how it's doing, so it's best treated as something to mention to a reptile shop online-experienced vet rather than something to work out alone from a general article.
This is a general good-practice principle rather than a precise science with fixed timings or quantities that apply to every household. How long to gut-load, and how often, depends on the insects being kept, the conditions they're kept in, and the feeding schedule of the animals they'll go to. Rather than following a single fixed rule, it helps to build gut-loading into the same routine as storing and checking livefood day to day, so it becomes a habit rather than an extra step.
Equipment and set-up are the first sensible place to look, simply because they're straightforward to check. A basking spot or ambient temperature that's drifted outside the usual range, whether from a faulty thermostat, a bulb reaching the end of its life, or a change in the room around the enclosure, is worth ruling out early. Checking actual readings, rather than assuming a thermostat dial is doing what it says, is a good habit to have regardless of appetite.
However good a livefood delivery is when it arrives, what happens to it between then and feeding day makes a real difference to the condition it's in when it's finally offered. Storage is arguably the most overlooked part of the whole feeding routine, and it's worth getting right.