Comment by geir_isene
20 hours ago
I'm on Claude Max, so it didn't cost me anything more than the subscription I already have. Had to use it for Something. As for time - for the full CHasm and Fe2O3 suite of sw, I started the work 2026-03-29 and have probably spent 60h or so of my time. But then again I have a very tailored CC setup that I have fine-tuned since last summer with more than 70 CC projects helping me get it the way I need it to be since then.
So, it's at most $400 in Claude expenses for a fully custom suite of software in 2 months. Even if your time is 300/h, it's less than $2k in your own time (which, I would expect, you enjoyed spending). That's insanely impressive.
I need Claude Max in any case for my work, so the cost is effectively null. And I do creative stuff in my spare time regardless, and I don't really think about my hourly rate when I play with my kids either ;)
Did you miss a factor of 10 in that time-cost calculation?
As a hobby, normal rates don’t apply, but just not to be misleading on the equivalent cost.
Indeed, I forgot it. Must be $10-20k worth of human engineering time.
Interested to hear about your CC setup if you'd like to share.
@geir_isene: This is insanely cool, thanks for writing about it.
Do you know how much it would have been at API prices?
Can't speak for their usage, but I calculated my token use with Copilot, my employer paid 22$ for >2000$ in tokens. Given estimates margins, Github is paying 98-99% of the costs for us. I imagine Claude max etc is similar. So it's not sustainable at all
No idea. Probably quite expensive. I usually run 4-5 concurrent CC sessions, so hard to pinpoint for just CHasm and Fe2O3