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Comment by jacobgold

1 day ago

"Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling."

I realize this text is just slop but it never stops being a "real bargain" at any point.

And it's more like $200/mo for $4000+/mo in tokens. You can also buy additional subscriptions.

There's no sense in running local models or doing anything else as long as VCs (and soon the public markets) are willing to pay your bill.

SemiAnalysis pushed this to the limit and managed to get $8,000 of tokens from a $200/month Anthropic plan and $14,000 of tokens from a $200/month OpenAI plan: https://twitter.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040

  • Yeah, although that is pushing every rate limit and no one knows what happens if you do that consistently? I think $4,000/mo is probably a good estimate for an individual dev doing synchronous coding agent work.

    • Yeah, I agree. I've been consistently getting about $1,000/month of value out of the $100/month subscription for OpenAI, and about the same for Anthropic.

      2 replies →

Even if they were making a profit, their scale and expertise will obviously give you a cheaper product than what you can build.

  • Maybe today but it's not a law of nature. It seems inevitable that AI models and coding agents will be fully commoditized eventually, just like computers, game engines, compilers, web servers, and so many other technologies have been.

    At the end of the day, AI models are relatively small files that we run little CUDA programs on.