Comment by KronisLV

> I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.

Probably not.

I also paid for FreeFileSync (the donation version) instead of rolling my own local backups (across drives), as well as MobaXTerm because I really like their UI/UX and so on. Software that others have developed and supported for multiple years, which has been already tested by a lot of folks thoroughly across their usecases is probably a good bet, doubly so if you can buy it (or I guess choose to support the devs) instead of renting it, the difference being that in the latter case you're not in control.

At the same time, 30 USD gets you about (assuming 85 input and 15 output split, which approximately matches my stats across months):

  * Gemini 3 Pro:  8.57M tokens (7.29M input, 1.29M output)
  * GPT 5.2:       8.36M tokens (7.11M input, 1.25M output)
  * Sonnet 4.5:    6.25M tokens (5.31M input, 0.94M output)

From: https://pricepertoken.com/

(actual figures would change with the input/output proportion, it matters a lot, and also any caching)

Not really enough to build serious software, but definitely quite the bit of help along the way!

Or if you go with subscriptions, it can vary even more, even if will cap how much you can do per day.

For example, if you pay 50 USD for Cerebras Code, you get 24M tokens per day, so that'd be close to 730M tokens per month. They're running GLM 4.7 which isn't SOTA in my experience, but is somewhere around Sonnet 4 and therefore actually quite capable: https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7 (my experience might not match the benchmarks, but either way it can be good enough for most stuff out there)

For a decent percentage of software development, maybe where you want a feature nobody else out there has, AI can help you get rid of enough friction and lend enough help along the way, to maybe make it worthwhile. The caveat there might be that you have to treat the expense of your own time as something you do for the enjoyment of it (building something, or the delayed gratification of benefitting from using the software).