Barathkanna
Barathkanna on Hacker News
Sounds like a plan, But what if you can just pay a fixed cost every month and not worry about anything?
That’s true, but AI is interesting because consumption-based pricing introduces a lot more variance than typical SaaS infrastructure. One user action can trigger dozens of model calls in an agent workflow. That’s partly why we started experimenting with models like
https://oxlo.ai where the pricing flips back to a fixed subscription and we absorb the usage spikes.
Local models help remove token cost uncertainty, but they shift the problem to infrastructure and ops. GPUs, scaling, maintenance, and latency can add up quickly depending on the workload. For many builders it ends up being a tradeoff between predictable infra cost and flexible API usage.
That’s great. Real-time tracking is a big step already. The tricky part we kept running into was the variance itself, especially with retries and agent loops. That’s partly why we started experimenting with Oxlo.ai (
https://oxlo.ai) where the pricing model absorbs that variance so builders don’t have to constantly model token risk.
One underlooked source of variance is retries from formatting failures. In many agent systems the loops dominate the cost, not the raw token length.
We ran into the same issue building agent workflows, which is why we started building https://oxlo.ai — experimenting with a flat subscription model where we absorb the token variance so builders don’t have to constantly model token risk.
Agreed. The real cost unit becomes the whole agent workflow, not a single LLM call. One user action can trigger dozens of calls.
We ran into the same issue and ended up building https://oxlo.ai to make the cost side more predictable for agent workloads.
Exactly. That’s actually why we started building Oxlo.ai. Early stage builders usually just want to experiment without worrying too much about token cost spikes.
True, but for early stage builders it’s harder to design those guardrails upfront. A lot of the time you only discover the retry patterns and cost spikes once real users start hitting the system.
Local models solve the marginal cost problem, but they move the complexity into infrastructure and throughput planning instead.
Posted by
Barathkanna on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @02:06AM
from the ask-hn dept.
I’ve been experimenting with agent-based features and one thing that surprised me is how hard it is to estimate API costs.A single user action can trigger anywhere from a few to dozens of LLM calls (tool use, retries, reasoning steps), and with token-based pricing the cost can vary a lot.How are builders here planning for this when pricing their SaaS?Are you just padding margins, limiting...
Posted by
Barathkanna on Monday February 23, 2026 @03:06PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.oxlo.ai/
Hi HN,I’m one of the founders of Oxlo.ai. We’re building a developer first AI API platform focused on simplifying how small teams integrate AI into production.Most AI APIs charge per token, which can make costs unpredictable as usage grows. Oxlo.ai takes a different approach: request based pricing with unlimited token output per request.We provide unified API access to curated open models...
Agreed. Self-hosting gives the cleanest fixed cost, but you pay for it in ops and capacity planning. I’m mainly curious whether there’s a middle ground that gives early teams more predictable spend without immediately taking on full infra overhead.
Posted by
Barathkanna on Tuesday January 27, 2026 @10:10AM
from the ask-hn dept.
The default norm today for using AI models via APIs is token based pricing, where you pay based on how much you use.While this isn’t hard to understand, in practice it makes costs harder to predict, especially for small teams moving from experiments to early production. This feels less like a technical problem and more like a budgeting and planning problem.I’m curious about alternative pricing...
I asked GPT for a rough estimate to benchmark prompt prefill on an 8,192 token input.
• 16× H100: 8,192 / (20k to 80k tokens/sec) ≈ 0.10 to 0.41s
• 2× Mac Studio (M3 Max): 8,192 / (150 to 700 tokens/sec) ≈ 12 to 55s
These are order-of-magnitude numbers, but the takeaway is that multi H100 boxes are plausibly ~100× faster than workstation Macs for this class of model, especially for long-context prefill.
That won’t realistically work for this model. Even with only ~32B active params, a 1T-scale MoE still needs the full expert set available for fast routing, which means hundreds of GB to TBs of weights resident. Mac Studios don’t share unified memory across machines, Thunderbolt isn’t remotely comparable to NVLink for expert exchange, and bandwidth becomes the bottleneck immediately. You could maybe load fragments experimentally, but inference would be impractically slow and brittle. It’s a very different class of workload than private coding models.
A realistic setup for this would be a 16× H100 80GB with NVLink. That comfortably handles the active 32B experts plus KV cache without extreme quantization. Cost-wise we are looking at roughly $500k–$700k upfront or $40–60/hr on-demand, which makes it clear this model is aimed at serious infra teams, not casual single-GPU deployments. I’m curious how API providers will price tokens on top of that hardware reality.
TLDR: AI didn’t diagnose anything, it turned years of messy health data into clear trends. That helped the author ask better questions and have a more useful conversation with their doctor, which is the real value here.
TLDR: IPv4 is fully exhausted and no longer growing. Internet growth now depends on IPv6 adoption and address sharing, but IPv6 rollout is still uneven across regions.
I get why this exists and appreciate the transparency, but it still feels like a slippery middle ground. Age prediction avoids hard ID checks, which is good for privacy, yet it also normalizes behavioral inference about users that can be wrong in subtle ways. I’m supportive of the safety goal, but long term I’m more comfortable with systems that rely on explicit user choice and clear guardrails rather than probabilistic profiling, even if that’s messier to implement
What’s interesting here isn’t the humanoid form factor, it’s the systems integration. Plugging robots into Siemens’ industrial stack means they’re being treated like first-class nodes in existing logistics workflows, not special demos. If humanoids can reuse current automation software, safety models, and ops tooling, that lowers adoption friction a lot. The real question is whether reliability and MTBF get good enough to compete with simpler, non-humanoid automation at scale.
TLDR: Soft deletes look easy, but they spread complexity everywhere. Actually deleting data and archiving it separately often keeps databases simpler, faster, and easier to maintain.
Thank you!! We are definitely fully focused on Developer experience. Would love some feedback if it looks interesting
Totally fair question, and you’re not being negative.
We’re not claiming better token economics in the sense of magically cheaper tokens, and we’re not just burning money to subsidize usage indefinitely. You’re right that this isn’t a new problem.
What we’re building is an AI API platform aimed at early developers and small teams who want to integrate AI without constantly reasoning about token math while they’re still experimenting or shipping early features. The value we’re trying to provide is predictability and simplicity, not beating the market on raw token prices. Some amount of cross-subsidy at low volumes is intentional and bounded, because lowering that early friction is the point.
If you want to see what we mean, the site is here: https://oxlo.ai
Happy to answer questions or go deeper on how we’re thinking about this.
That’s fair, and I probably didn’t explain it clearly. We’re building an AI API as a service platform aimed at early developers and small teams who want to integrate AI without constantly thinking about tokens at all.
I agree that token economics are basically a commodity today. The problem we’re trying to address isn’t beating the market on raw token prices, but removing the mental and financial overhead of having to model usage, estimate burn, and worry about runaway costs while experimenting or shipping early features. In that sense it’s absolutely an engineering and finance problem combined, and we’re intentionally tackling it at the pricing and API layer rather than pretending the underlying models are unique.
Posted by
Barathkanna on Friday January 16, 2026 @11:35AM
from the ask-hn dept.
Hi HN,I’ve noticed a recurring theme in many threads here: AI is powerful, but once you move past demos, token-based pricing becomes expensive and hard to reason about.We ran into this problem ourselves while building AI-powered systems. Predicting costs, budgeting usage, and experimenting safely all got harder as workloads grew. So we built a small AI inference platform focused on lower and...
I agree with the core concern, but I think the right model is smaller, not zero. One or two strong technical writers using AI as a leverage tool can easily outperform a large writing team or pure AI output. The value is still in judgment, context, and asking the right questions. AI just accelerates the mechanics.
This mostly changes how location is requested, not what you can do with it. Instead of imperative JS calls, location access becomes declarative in HTML, which gives browsers more context for permission UX and auditing. Your app logic, data flow, and fallbacks don’t change, and you’ll still need JS to actually use the location. Think of it as a cleaner permission and intent layer, not a new geolocation capability.
This is pretty eye-opening. It really drives home how simple the core control logic can be. Starting with toy cars or small-scale vehicles feels like a great way to teach and validate these ideas before layering on unnecessary complexity.
As an edge computing enthusiast, this feels like a meaningful leap for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Having a low-power inference accelerator baked into the platform opens up a lot of practical local AI use cases without dragging in the cloud. It’s still early, but this is the right direction for real edge workloads.
For those wondering how this differs from Nvidia GPUs:
Nvidia = flexible, general-purpose GPUs that excel at training and mixed workloads.
Furiosa = purpose-built inference ASICs that trade flexibility for much better cost, power efficiency, and predictable latency at scale.