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Comment by holistio

15 hours ago

You pay $200/month to Anthropic, $200/month to OpenAI, $200/month to Cursor, $200/month to $200/month to Google, and seeing that it didn't come to a nice round $1024/month, you pay $200/month to Sakana to coordinate it all, because why not.

While you're at it, feel free to send me $200 as well, I'll generate a crypto address ending with "AI".

40 comments

holistio

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ricardobeat  5 hours ago

My current setup:

    $20/month: Claude Code
    $10/month: Minimax
    $16/month: Xiaomi Mimo
    $10/month: Opencode Go

Opus at low/medium effort generates plans. Then several coordinator/worker pairs are possible: DeepSeek v4 Pro + Minimax M3, Mimo v2.5 Pro + Mimo v2.5, Mimo + Minimax, Sonnet 4.6 + Haiku. I've been running hundreds of long multi-agent sessions, topped up extra credits here and theere, but haven't reached $200/month spend yet. Relying entirely on Claude/Codex feels like a waste of cash now.

holistio  15 hours ago

TIL: I just found out that base58 disallows I (capital i), l (lowercase L), O (capital o) and 0 (zero), so I could only generate GrxoJt4eNXE2QaQ55iPSa7hhiYdzCo8ZeAuokmh2Cai.

(don't send anything, sharing only because of the base58 fun fact I didn't know)

  • IdiotSavage  7 hours ago

    More fun facts:

    Omitting those characters makes it good for generating passwords if they need to be typed in by hand.

    Double-clicking a base58 string always selects the whole string and it doesn't wrap accidentally, thanks to missing / and +, so it's also convenient to copy and paste.

    • wasabi991011  18 minutes ago

      Unfortunately, no special characters means that a base58 string will often be rejected as a secure enough password.

robertwt7  13 hours ago

at this point I might just try Neuralwatt and see how much request I can get with GLM5.2. I've read a lot of reviews that its very cheap to run using Neuralwatt cloud

rvz  14 hours ago

Pay $0 to run a local model or even a cheap DeepSeek V4 model via their API which is close to free per million tokens.

These prices are just going to get raced to $0.

  • a2128  10 hours ago

    I used to have a $20/mo ChatGPT subscription and now I spend $12 per year using Kimi models on OpenRouter, and that's with zero-data-retention-only providers (some models sometimes have free providers with scary tracking). Maybe I just don't use that many tokens, I don't fill the context with more than what's needed for a specific request, but it goes to show how these subscriptions can be an absolute ripoff. The thought of spending 200x that is insane to me

    • mark_l_watson  6 hours ago

      The beauty of your approach: when people are not paying for an expensive subscription, they can decide to use models less and not feel like they are leaving money on the table.

  • holistio  14 hours ago

    Maybe. But for now it's fascinating how $200/month has kind of become a normal tier.

    It's similar to how AirPods normalised all of us having $300+ headphones. All of us would have scoffed at the idea a decade ago.

    • mark_l_watson  6 hours ago

      But, it is not all about cost: models like DeepSeek v4 flash (I use the US company Fireworks.ai and also buy tokens directly from DeepSeek) is very fast, very low latency while working.

      Would you want to use a text editor that updates the screen very slowly? Kind of the same thing for using agentic systems as coding assistants: don’t want a ‘sluggish’ experience.

      1 reply →

    • sofixa  13 hours ago

      The Sony WH-1000XM series and the Bose QC35 were the standard quality headphones years before AirPods were a thing, and both retailed at $300+.

      3 replies →

  • qainsights  4 hours ago

    Not everyone can run local models. It is also expensive will be outdated soon as the model evolves.

  • kijin  14 hours ago

    Not while the hardware required to run a local model at an acceptable speed costs way more than $200.

    Guess what, the big players are hoarding all the RAM and GPUs so that other people can't afford decent hardware. It's working out beautifully for them!

    • sofixa  13 hours ago

      > Not while the hardware required to run a local model at an acceptable speed costs way more than $200

      It's $200/month. You have to take into account energy costs and all the rest of a system, but if you break even within 1-2 years ($2400-$4800) it'd be a pretty good deal. And $4000 buys you a pretty decent system.

      1 reply →

audreyt  14 hours ago

Happy user here, pairing it with Composer 2.5, with Fugu Ultra as advisor and Fugur as planner. For scope/architecture it’s on par with useful Fable-style orchestration than one chat thread.

I've been shipping production on archive.tw with Fugu Ultra in /advisor on oh-my-pi.

Advisor doesn’t slow the loop if the driver stays fast. Worth it if your harness can split advisor from worker.