Comment by alganet
8 months ago
Cool, makes sense.
Since you're here, I have another question relevant to the thread: do you pay for AI tools or are you using them for free?
8 months ago
Cool, makes sense.
Since you're here, I have another question relevant to the thread: do you pay for AI tools or are you using them for free?
TL;DR: I pay, I always try to use SOTA models if I can.
I pay for them; until last week, this was almost entirely[0] pay-as-you-go use of API keys via TypingMind (for chat) and Aider (for coding). The QR code project I linked was made by Aider. Total cost was around $1 IIRC.
API options were, until recently, very cheap. Most of my use was around $2 to $5 per project, sometimes under $2. I mostly worked with GPT-4, then Sonnet 3.5, briefly with Deepseek-R1; by the time I got around to testing Claude Sonnet 3.7, Google released Gemini 2.5 Pro, which was substantially cheaper, so I stuck to the latter.
Last week I got myself the Max plan for Anthropic (first 5x, then the 20x one) specifically for Claude Code, because using pay-as-you-go pricing with top models in the new "agentic" way got stupidly expensive; $100 or $200 per month may sound like a lot, but less so when taking the API route would have you burn this much in a day or two.
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[0] - I have the $20/month "Plus" subscription to ChatGPT, which I keep because of gpt-4o image generation and o3 being excellent as my default model for random questions/problems, many of them not even coding-related. I could access o3 via API, but this gets stupidly expensive for casual use; subscription is a better deal now.
> TL;DR: I pay, I always try to use SOTA models if I can.
Interesting; I'm finding myself doing the opposite — I have API access to at least OpenAI, but all the SOTA stuff becomes free so fast that I don't expect to lose much by waiting.
My OpenAI API credit expired mostly unused.