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A comment on Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget. Parent comment

Re:Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Business... by furyofantares on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:28AM (#49966135)
That's cool.

I have agents going pretty much nonstop for hobby projects. This is great value for me because I get to see a lot of things I'm interested in come to life. It's very token-inefficient though and if usage limits were reduced much this wouldn't be worth doing.

For my actual job though, I don't let agents go for hours on end and I care about the code. I spend between $1000 and $2000 per month there. Of course we pay API pricing. I wonder how much you're getting for that $20 in API pricing, it could be 10x or even 50x. At least on the max plans it can be that high if you are hitting usage limits, I don't know about the 20.

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Re:Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Business... by antonis-gr on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:52PM (#49969753)
20/month buy enough intelligence to build comprehensive plans for dirt cheap models to execute. My observation is that unambiguous specs create high quality code regardless of model, and cheap models are more obedient than SOTA.

I may be wrong, I just describe what works for me. Exhaustive documentation and frequent checkpoints with SOTA on subscription, and execution with cheap Chinese models on openrouter. It is not easy to overspend.

[ Parent | on HN ]